“Unlocking the Secrets of Interactive Storytelling: Gavin Michael Booth Reveals How to Captivate Audiences in Episode 533 of SYS Podcast!”
Ashley
Perfect. So maybe you can take us through your writing process a little bit, just where do you typically write, when do you typically write, what does just your writing process look like sort of in general, and then maybe we’ll talk specifically about the Dream Crusher project because it’s probably a little different than what you’re normally used to.
Gavin Michael Booth
Lately this year, I’m coming to you live from my garage, which is my little garage studio. So a lot of my writing is done here, but I also travel a lot for work and I can write anywhere. I just, I mean, the process I start with now is on my phone notepad or I have a Google drive where I kind of have a folder and a Google doc for every project that I’m brainstorming or thinking about. And every time I have any idea from like, oh, that’s a good character name, or oh, that’s a funny line, or oh, here’s an idea for a scene. I just go pop it into that Google drive and eventually I’ll open one of those for a movie or a series and be like, oh, there’s like 500 notes in this Google doc. There’s probably enough here to start like forming what it is. I can be very slow in the development side of things and it’s just all kind of like, you know, like a boulder going downhill and just gathering velocity. But once I’ve sort of got something locked in, I get pretty obsessive with it and can pound out sort of first drafts pretty quickly. I’m very big on getting feedback. I kind of have a trusted circle of friends that we can share scripts and get notes. Some people take notes as the enemy of creativity. And it can be true if there’s, you know, a studio executive or somebody telling you, like, you have to change this or we won’t make it. But notes to me are great. And the minute that two to five people give you the same note or a similar version of a note, you can’t ignore it. That means there’s something up that everybody’s identifying as not working or maybe should be changed. But I like writing in coffee shops. I like writing in places where there’s just a lot of noise around me because that sort of white noise helps just tune everything out. I like writing with music. I think, I mean, how many screen writers will tell you the same story? Like I put on my favorite movie soundtracks, but when I was in high school trying to write my first movies, it was the Braveheart soundtrack. It would be, you know, anything by James Horner or John Williams, it was always on CD in the background when we’re trying to write. So instrumental music is a big help to help kind of keep my mind not getting caught up in lyrics. But it was just, this one was interesting because I definitely wrote a treatment for each of the seven episodes because I just think about moving pieces around to build up that mystery before. I didn’t want to, sometimes I’ll do the vomit drafts which is like, here’s the core idea for a movie, go. But because this was so intricate, I wanted to make sure that I had a very, very detailed outline of each episode and how it would all play out.
