ALL: How did you start writing?
Jeff: Originally I wanted to be an actor. I started writing my own monologues. I wanted to be an Eric Bogosian or a Spalding Gray. I was kind of a precocious kid because I would do these monologues. I would rent out the third floor library of my high school and just do these little [shows], Jeff Pfeiffer: Live at the Third Floor Library.
I was an indoor kid growing up. I wasn't a sports kid, I didn't do a lot of activities except for the musicals or the acting stuff, so I was constantly at home watching TV and movies. I would scan the TV guide for a movie and highlight it. "Oh, The Third Man is going to be on at 3am, I've got to set the VCR." I would watch classic movies like Bicycle Thieves or Third Man. It wasn't exactly sitting in a smoky Parisian theater on the Left Bank but somehow I just really fell in love with the romance of cinema. And that's still what I return to anytime I get stuck and go "Why am I doing this?"
ALL: That's so great, being that young and putting yourself out there like that.
Jeff: I think I had less fear then and I'm more neurotic now. I went to Syracuse for film. I wanted to write, act, and direct my own films, but I found that it was too much to handle, and the thing I loved most was just sitting in my room and writing, coming up with the ideas.
I went out to Hollywood after college and worked as an assistant on a lot of shows. I had a really hard time because I found out quickly that being an assistant is extremely dog-eat-dog, and you're tasked with doing a lot of getting cars washed and getting coffee. I thought at the time that I'd become a playwright, so I went to NYU to study playwriting.
When I was in LA I was working on some plays, I was working with a theater group that was very experimental and very far from the movie business, a great group called Sacred Fools. I was doing very late-night, almost like sketch comedy experimental theater—there were no rules, I could do anything I wanted. I was writing a lot of stuff. After NYU I did a play at the Fringe Festival and I think that's kind of where I started to feel like, okay, I'm actually doing this now, this is actually happening a little bit for me.
It's never quite like, okay, now I'm a writer. You always feel like you're hustling for the next one. After that one is over you're like, where's the next one going to come from?
ALL: Why should someone take the Introduction to Screenwriting class and what they might expect to get out of it?
Jeff: My philosophy is really that I want students to write what they want to write, but I also feel like it's important to have a set of tools that you can use. It's a balance in some sense because I've had teachers who have been complete naysayers: you're not doing this right or this idea is not going to work. I don't want to be that person. On the other hand, your work will go far if you have the right toolbox. Have creativity, have free reign, but also know where you can use structural elements to make your work better.
ALL: You mentioned having a two-year-old son and said you're not getting a chance to read a whole lot right now, which I think is a pretty universal experience. Are you getting a chance to write?
Jeff: I usually have three projects going at once. If I get stuck on one I'll go to the next one, but at a certain point I tend to gravitate towards one. I am working on something right now. It's a script that I don't think I could have written in LA, I think I had to come here to do it. I think I had to get out of the world of audience mandates and commercial strictures and just get in my own headspace.
[Madison] is a great place to write, actually, because you just feel calm and it doesn't take you ten hours to drive anywhere. You can have your life and still work. But also, I think, getting out of LA, too, I feel like I have a larger sense of empathy. There's that Midwestern thing where people are just generally more open and friendly and I think that has sort of let me find a sense of empathy towards others and myself.
Nothing will make you [a writer] other than just having the confidence that you are that. For me, getting into an MFA program was like being able to draw a line in the sand and say this is actually a thing now. But when I think about it, it was no more making me a writer than owning a pen. Getting work published and having an audience, you can never control those things. You cannot control who is going to reject something. And every writer I know who's very famous has had tons of rejections and tons of false starts but the part that you can control is the actual sitting down yourself. Once I’m in that zone there could be bombs going off and I might not really notice.
ALL: What gets you in the zone? What does that look like for you?
Jeff: My process can be chaotic at times, but generally after I've settled down I start brainstorming: writing down anything I can think of. If I have notes on little scraps of paper I take those too and write them all down into one document. I write down bits of dialogue, scenes I'd like to see, characters who may come and go, anything and everything. It can be the most rewarding part of the process because I have the most fun and the most excitement about my new undertaking. Sometimes I have so much to work with that I feel like I'll never get it all into one script. That's where I love to be, because it means I'll never be short on ideas and I just need to make some decisions. I'd rather start at that place than with too little and have to pull more material out of somewhere.
The next thing I do is outline. An outline can sometimes take as long as several months. In the outline, I'll really try to nail the story down. This can be the hardest part. Somehow those scraps and ideas all have to organize themselves into a sequential order, and I don't know how, but somehow, eventually, they do.
Sometimes I think I've got the story cracked only to realize I have a huge plot hole I forgot to address, or I resolved things too easily. If that happens I go back and reassess. Sometimes I go back to my brainstorm scraps and ask myself, "What was it about this idea that initially drew me to it? Let's go back to that." Then it's just about writing and rewriting. I can rewrite forever. "Finished" is an undefined concept.
ALL: What else do you want people to know about the course?
Jeff: This is actually kind of a good time for writing. There are so many content seekers right now, and you don't have to live in NY or LA necessarily. There are submission sites everywhere. There are people hungry for new voices.
Lean into your own ideas and your own stuff, what you feel is really burning in you. Lean into your weird. Lean into the things that you're obsessed with because I guarantee there are other people that feel that way, too. If you have the construction materials and the building blocks you can turn your obsessions into something other people will find interesting as well.
I love the William Goldman thing of, "Nobody knows anything." He's the screenwriter who wrote Butch Cassidy and Princess Bride. Princess Bride was a really good example of that because people thought it was going to bomb and nobody understood what it was. The industry will always tell you, "This isn't going to work." Write the story you are burning to tell. If it doesn't work, at least you've been true to yourself. You have many opportunities to get it right.
ALL: What submission opportunities are out there in the realm of screenwriting?
Jeff: The internet has flattened the world. There are so many screenwriting contests and festivals now. There's a lot of fellowships in screenwriting as well. Every big media company has one. They're looking specifically for people who have not been working TV writers in the field.
ALL: What are some of your favorite writing resources? Craft books, websites, podcasts? What do you go to when you're working on your own craft, or for inspiration, or?
Jeff: The book that I find most useful is Backwards and Forwards by David Ball. It really breaks down dramatic structure into such essential components. One of my biggest takeaways is that drama really operates on suspense -- not necessarily in a Hitchcockian way (though that isn't bad) but you want to draw your audience in with a sense of "what will happen next?" You're pulling them through on an invisible thread that unspools into the dark.
I find inspiration in poetry. And, whatever project I'm working on, I find an analog to it, whether it's a book or a movie, and I just find myself returning to those sources and saying "what is it about this movie that I love or this book that I love, and what is it about this project that reminds me of those two things?" I want to be conscious not to rip it off. I want to feel that spirit and then I want to be able to imbue that into my own work.
