{"id":2,"date":"2011-02-14T11:37:50","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T19:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johnworsley.name\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2016-09-09T12:12:59","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T19:12:59","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/?page_id=2","title":{"rendered":"About Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

John R. Worsley is an unrepresented screenwriter living in Portland, OR.\u00a0 Not to be confused with his third cousin John C. Worsley<\/a>, a graphic artist also living in Portland, OR.\u00a0 Don’t worry, they look different.<\/p>\n

John prefers to speak of himself in the first person, so I will.\u00a0 I have dabbled with short poetry, long poetry, flash fiction, short stories, a novelette, a novel, and a non-fiction book.\u00a0 But after discovering how much easier screenwriting is, I have gone over to the dark side.\u00a0 Some of my best friends are novelists, so I will continue to visit the other side as long as the border guards will admit me.<\/p>\n

I joke about screenwriting being easier; here’s what I mean.\u00a0 I have always enjoyed words: hearing them, saying them, playing with them.\u00a0 Growing up I read constantly (200 books one summer for a library contest); engaged in creative word usement with my siblings (many nouns were verbed<\/a>); and enjoyed writing essays in school.\u00a0 I was not a significant movie-goer then, and have never, in fact \u2013 unlike many screenwriters \u2013 been a film buff.<\/p>\n

At 19 I discovered that a friend of mine was a film buff, and saw my first indie films, but my own tastes have been rather too particular to appreciate a wide spectrum of films.\u00a0 It wasn’t until my late 20s that I learned writing was involved in movies; an obvious point, in retrospect, but I’d never thought about it.\u00a0 From that moment on, I began to pay more attention to film, to think about it more.\u00a0 As the recent spate of popular Jane Austen film adaptations<\/a> hit, I brainstormed with a friend on adapting one of the novels which hadn’t been done yet.\u00a0 I began writing more during that period too \u2014 all fiction, and partly inspired by my discovery of National Novel Writing Month<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And then it happened.\u00a0 Spring 2007.\u00a0 Script Frenzy<\/a>.\u00a0 The delightful folks at the Office of Letters and Light<\/a> decided that running an enormously popular and ever-expanding global writing effort (NaNoWriMo) was not enough, and launched a screenplay-in-a-month program as well.\u00a0 My growing interest in film and screenwriting made participating in Script Frenzy an obvious choice.\u00a0 And to my surprise I discovered that \u2013 whereas the process of extracting from my mind a first draft of a work of fiction is nothing short of excruciating \u2013 stories in screenplay form flow more easily from me.<\/p>\n

For the next several years I continued to compare my experiences with the two monthly events, in November and April.\u00a0 My first script was an adaptation, so I wondered whether that might be rendering the writing unnaturally easier.\u00a0 But when I began to write original scripts I found that while the first draft was still arduous, the sense of being able to feel my way through the story was still present.\u00a0 That really got my attention.<\/p>\n

As I thought about my writing history, I noticed several facts.\u00a0 I wrote my first short story (in high school, for a creative writing class) by imagining it as a film.\u00a0 When writing fiction, I do not tend to get inside my characters’ heads, as is normal and encouraged for the form.\u00a0 And ideas for film stories come much more easily to me than ideas for fiction stories.\u00a0 All that, plus the difference in writing experience, led me to make the jump in spring 2009.\u00a0 I have since then been pursuing screenwriting with everything I can muster.\u00a0 I find it completely rewarding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John R. Worsley is an unrepresented screenwriter living in Portland, OR.\u00a0 Not to be confused with his third cousin John C. Worsley, a graphic artist also living in Portland, OR.\u00a0 Don’t worry, they look different. John prefers to speak of himself in the first person, so I will.\u00a0 I have dabbled with short poetry, long…<\/p>\n Read More<\/span> About Me<\/span><\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["entry","author-me","post-2","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160,"href":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnworsley.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}