Q&A with Wenonah Wilms: Persistence Pays Off
When you’re a currently-in-self-teaching-mode baby screenwriter with only a couple of scripts under your belt (ahem, me), it’s inspiring to talk with someone who’s put in all of the work and is now at the other side of the tunnel. What’s more inspiring is to learn that people on the other side of that tunnel can, in fact, be human—maybe even funny, humble, and kind?! I’m the biggest fan and firmest believer in Minnesota’s creative culture, and it was a joy to hear Minnesota screenwriter Wenonah Wilms share her wisdom on a storytelling panel at the recent Catalyst Story Institute festival in Duluth (I wrote a little about the rest of my festival experience in my musing about competitiveness). Wenonah is so accomplished, smart, and hilarious—one of the first things she brought up in our Q&A was Ben Affleck—and her twenty years of honing a self-taught work ethic have been firmly rooted in fun.
Wenonah is an award-winning screenwriter who amazingly won the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition, the Academy Nicholl Fellowship, and a second McKnight Fellowship all in 2018. Entirely self-taught, she’s written over twenty feature-length screenplays and she’s had six short films produced. Wenonah is a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and Native American stories and characters figure prominently in her work. Her film “Sunshine” played at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in 2006 and her film “Waabooz” (2017) starred acclaimed native actor Saginaw Grant. Wenonah was also the showrunner and head writer for the comedy web series “Fem 101.” Now, she’s working in a TV writers’ room in addition to writing for a variety of other projects.
If you’ve been feeling discouraged by the long slog of the creative career journey, read on for all the reminders and inspiration you need to get back to work and—most importantly—to enjoy the ride.
Q&A with Wenonah Wilms, screenwriter
Q: How did you get started in screenwriting?
A: Okay, it’s a really dumb story but I’ve told it so many times I’m sort of getting over the embarrassment of it all. In 2001 there was a show called Project Greenlight on HBO. I was a stay-at-home mom, I had three little kids, and I was just looking for something fun to do. I have other hobbies—I bake, I crochet, sew—so I was just looking for something interesting to do at home. The show came on, and I had—have—this stupid lady boner crush on Ben Affleck. (I’m still defending it. This is like the second J. Lo we’re on now, right?) If you won the show’s competition, you got your script produced by Ben and Matt and then you got to fly out to L.A. and meet them, and I was like, “Oh my god I want to meet them and be their buddy! …with my three small children in tow!” So I was like, “What do I gotta do? Oh, I gotta write a script? Cool, I’ll figure that out.” I bought a couple of books and pretty much just taught myself. It’s a dumb way to get into a career, but it’s finally paying off. Obviously, it’s been a lot of years of continuing to self-teach and to practice my craft and learn and workshop and network and all of the other stuff.
Q: What was your self-teaching process like? Any books or resources that especially helped you?
A: Weirdly enough, what helped me was having all these kids around, because it made me use my time very efficiently and be grateful when I had pockets of time. It’s actually harder now that my kids are grown because I have to decide, like, what time of the hour I want to work. I bought a lot of the regular books—Syd Field, the ones that everyone tells you—and I got really bored a lot with the heavy prose. The kind of books that helped me most were ones like David Trottier’s The Screenwriter’s Bible—that’s one of my favorite ones, as far as referencing formatting goes. But the best way to learn screenwriting is just to read scripts. All the scripts that you can. The bad ones, the good ones, the produced ones. The ones that are awful that your friends write. Read them! Because you figure out what works and what doesn’t work on the page. One of the things I’ve been doing recently—because TV is primarily adaptations—is reading the book and then watching the movie and then reading the script, and seeing how all these pieces fit together and what the screenwriter did to adapt and to condense. Those are tools that I’ve been using lately. But yeah, basics is just basics. You just have to get in there and write. And get the right software, buy Final Draft. The professional stuff is way easier to use.
Q: You’ve written a ton of scripts. How has quantity been important in improving the quality of your work?
A: For me, quality shakes out after rewrites. I hate rewriting so so so much that my defense mechanism was just to keep writing new scripts. So I did. I’ve written around 25 features, and for me it was all about the deadlines and getting it into the competitions. I always thought that if I had a really strong concept and a really good grasp of the craft—while there might be scenes that weren’t working as well or dialogue that needed tweaking—I felt that if it was good enough conceptually and it was like a diamond in the rough, then it was going to get through the first round of any competition. So, I just kept throwing things in every year. And only occasionally, if it didn’t progress but I still believed in it, would I stop and be like, “Alright, it’s time to rewrite this and really make it shine and make it what it wants to be.” But, again, I hate rewriting. I’m better at it now; I feel more confident in the rewriting process. But I would literally just toss first drafts over my shoulder because I hated pulling stuff apart again. The funny thing is that it actually worked. Because Horsehead Girls—which is the feature that won the McKnight, the Austin, and the Nicholl all in one year—it was a first draft that I turned in. And the shitty part about turning in a first draft and winning on such big competitions is that the work gets out there. People are passing it around, and I’m like, “Oh my god I got a first draft that the world is pulling apart!” That was a big lesson for me. Yes, I was right, I think a good diamond in the rough can get through. But you should go back and revise it just in case the world is going to look at it.
Q: Do you like competitions?
A: I do, and I can say that because I’ve won them. But when you don’t win them, you hate them. And you vow never to give those fifty dollars over again. For me it worked, but I think it’s because I live in Minnesota, and I had no formal training so I didn’t grow in my career with a network of peers that you get out of school, and then internships, and your first jobs in the industry, things like that. I did it from Minnesota as a stay-at-home mom with no education and no connections to the industry, and it did take me a long time. There are so many routes. There’s just so many ways to get to Hollywood or to whatever your ultimate goal in this career is. For me it was competitions, but I think it would’ve happened a lot earlier had I gone to school, had I known a bunch of screenwriters—but it’s just the way that it happened for me.
Q: What is your creative process like, from idea to finished product?
A: It’s changed in the last two years since I’ve gotten work. Now I’m getting assigned IP, books and things that I’m adapting. So, the process is a little different since the idea and the characters are already there, and I have to rework them. For original ideas, you know—everyone has a notebook. You gotta fill up your notebook or your Notes app with a billion stupid ideas, which I still do. I think about an idea a lot before I put it down on paper or even talk about it, because even just saying to someone, “I have this idea, what do you think?”—for some reason it takes a little bit of the air out. I like to think a long, long time before I talk to anybody or put anything down just to see if it keeps me excited. If I stay up at night and I wake up like, “Alright, I gotta write this down!” and I know that I’m building something in my head that I want to see—that’s exciting for me. I don’t outline. So, this is a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It serviced me for a long time as a spec writer at home. I’d have notes of things that I wanted, I’d seen the opening in my head a million times, and I’d just start writing it. After about the first act, you sort of know your characters, you kind of know the setting and the world, and then I just let them take over. I like to be surprised, I like to discover things on the page as I go. I’ve been doing it for so long, I know by what page I need to hit the inciting incident in the first act—I’ve got that all dialed in. But: I’m finding that in a writers’ room where our entire goal is to outline episodes and then third episodes and fourth episodes and a whole season—it’s so challenging. I regret not learning how to outline, or not using it as a tool, because you have to. It’s even in your contracts when you’re writing, it’s part of a step that they pay for. They want you to turn in an outline before you do any writing. So I’m learning. But it’s so much more fun to just write and be like, “Where are we going today, friends?”
Q: Your first script was based on your grandmother’s childhood experience in an Indian boarding school. How did you weave together such an emotional family story with the craft of structuring it into a cohesive script?
A: For Ben Affleck, right?
Q: Of course, for Ben Affleck.
A: I ultimately did not turn it in to that particular competition because I was like, “Really Wenonah? You’re gonna turn in your grandma’s thing for a screenplay competition?” Yeah, no. I was looking for a story to start practicing the things that I was reading about. I was like, “If I’m going to write a script, I need a story.” My grandmother was in the boarding school system in the 1920s for about ten years. She didn’t tell anybody about that—a lot of Native American elders did not talk about their experiences—but she wrote everything down. So, I have this big document that she at first hand-wrote and then my dad transcribed when I was 16. She passed away when I was in my 20s and I had not gotten a hold of that document. Even as a young adult, I didn’t really know what the boarding school situation was, what my grandmother’s role in it was. I was surprised and shocked and saddened and horrified to read it. It was really hard to read it. But I knew that it was a really good story about our history that needed to be told. So, I was like, “Well, she’s gone, I’m not going to rip off her story.” I wanted to honor her. It was very cathartic, very emotional. I did a contemporary telling of a native girl, a teenager, who gets pregnant and is with her grandmother who’s being haunted by the ghost of her boarding school. Together they take a road trip back to this school. It’s sort of a family road trip ghost story. It’s one of the only scripts that I continued to work on, to rewrite, because I believed in it so much. Six years after I wrote it, I won the McKnight with it. It felt good to finally come full circle and get some recognition. It’s never gotten made, but it served its purpose for me personally and professionally. It’s a really good writing sample and it’s something near and dear to my heart. And now I’m working on a script called Perma Red that I’m hoping to get a greenlight on. It’s a boarding school story about a 16-year-old girl in Montana. It’s an adaptation of a book, and I’m able to put some parts of my grandmother’s story into it because there are some universalities to the things that these kids went through.
Q: What advice do you have for self-taught artists who are still in the early stages of developing their craft?
A: The biggest thing for me is—it sounds so trite, but—don’t stop! Don’t give up. I proved to myself after 20 years of doing this that I’m finally breaking in and making a career. I didn’t start writing until I was 30. I’m 50 now, and this is not like the best time for a person to start a career. It’s tough. But I didn’t give up. And I was never going to give up. I was going to keep entering competitions, keep writing crappy first drafts, keep doing my thing—because I was happy. And I know you can’t pay the bills with happiness—I’m lucky that I had a husband who has an actual job—but I was never going to give up. You really cannot have an ego. You have to be able to take creative criticism and notes and have a thick skin and listen to people that you respect. If you’re thinking, “You’re a good writer and you’re saying this is shit,” you have to say, “I believe you.” You can’t take it too personally, which is really hard because you’re throwing all of yourself into your pages. This is you, this is your baby, you’re emotional on the page, and yet someone’s like “that’s terrible” and it makes you feel bad! It still makes me feel bad. But only for a minute, you know? I feel bad for a minute, and then I think, “Okay, you’re right, it’s terrible, let’s make it better, we’re all on the same team of good writing.” So just don’t give up. If this is your dream, don’t give up. And you might not make it, you know? You have to live with the reality that it might not happen. But if this is what you love doing, it’s going to come out on the page. And people will see that. They’ll see your passion. And that’s half the battle right there.
Learn more about Wenonah and hear her talk about her work in this beautiful artist profile.
Here are a couple of the books by Syd Field and David Trottier that Wenonah mentioned. But remember, it’s even more important to read scripts!
While specifically focused on painting, this list of tips for self-taught artists can apply to any medium. “Expect nothing, but aim for everything.”
Read more Wild Minds posts here.