A Conversation with Alan Olifson

I recently reunited with an old friend from the Los Angeles storytelling community, Alan Olifson, who has recently published a collection of essays, entitled Manchild: My Life Without Adult Supervision. While I was busy producing Spark Off Rose, he was producing and performing at his spoken word show WordPlay. All these years later, he is now living in Pittsburgh where he landed a publishing deal. In our interview below you'll get a peek inside his writing journey and his best advice on how to get your essay anthology published!

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ALAN OLIFSON is an award-winning humor columnist, public radio commentator, comedian and regular host of Pittsburgh's monthly Moth StorySLAMs. He created the acclaimed storytelling series WordPlay in his hometown of Los Angeles which he now produces in Pittsburgh along with Bricolage Production Company as part of their regular season. He has hosted storytelling events for conferences, schools and, believe it or not, bridal showers. Alan relocated to Pittsburgh with his wife and two children years ago but never tires of hearing people complain about "traffic." His book, Manchild: My Life Without Adult Supervision, is now out on Six Gallery Press.

Karin: Well, this is very exciting about your book. Of course I remember the ManChild essays well from your spoken word days in Los Angeles. Can you share the basic premise for those who are new to your writing?

Alan: So it's called Manchild: My Life Without Adult Supervision and it's really just a chronicle of finding out what it means to be an adult. I think most people have a hard time, especially just out of college, like in your early 20s, like, “Oh wow, I'm an adult now.” There's not really a big transition period from college to adulthood. And I think it took a long time fumbling my way through my 20s and 30s to figure out what adulthood meant to me. And in doing so I did all the adult things like getting married and having kids and buying a house, but I never felt like an adult doing them. So it's kind of exploring what that's like.

How did it make its way into book form?

It has been a long winding journey. It's been funny editing it now because some of these essays are now over 10 years old. I started writing these when I briefly had a column for The Boston Phoenix through some random connections. I think it's defunct now. It was like the L.A. Weekly of Boston. I wrote a column once a month, and that got me into essay writing in the first place.

I amassed a nice little backlog of stories and I got into the story telling scene out in LA. I would take these essays around to shows and tweak them and rewrite them. I did Sit and Spin, and your show (Spark Off Rose) and then I started my own show Wordplay out there at the Fake Gallery, which ended up going on for five years. So at the end I had 20 or 30 essays.

And then it all started because an agent contacted me, through Twitter or Facebook, I can't remember where. She found one of my pieces on The Phoenix and really enjoyed it and was curious if I ever thought about putting a book together. That kind of got my wheels turning. It was really encouraging, but it still never amounted to anything. She was just a low-level agent and she never really could sell the idea to her upper-whoever. Through that I worked with various people and got a proposal together and a decent query letter. The query letter got a good amount of response but basically it came down to “an essay collection by someone that no one's ever heard of is just a tough sell,” which I understand. Everyone was like, “the writing is funny and I enjoyed it, but I just can't sell this.” So I put it on the back burner.

So when I moved to Pittsburgh I thought I'd start to put my feelers out for a local, Pittsburgh-based publisher - a micro press - because I was basically ready to self-publish it. One of the draws of Pittsburgh is it's got a pretty lively comedy and literary and theater scene. So I was like, “I'll just try and see if I can get a small press interested.” I sent out a few letters and one place got back to me - Six Gallery Press - and they were really interested, but they were totally backlogged. It's a very small company and I waited about a year for them to finally have some time. It took another year of them editing it and here we are. It took moving to Pittsburgh to make it happen.

Tell us about Six Gallery Press.

They do a lot of poetry and more experimental fiction. My editor has admitted to me that “This is the most bourgeois thing we've ever put out.” They're kind of on the 'anarchist' end of the spectrum politically. And you know my book is very much the suburban dad kind of stuff. So it's a funny combination but it seems to work. It meant a lot that this guy actually found it funny and wanted to publish given that he's coming from a completely different place in his life. So it's nice to see some kind of universal appeal there, I guess.

Can you still stand behind your essays even though they were written so long ago?

It's a good question. Some of them I cringed reading them again. And some of them don't represent who I think I am now. But the book is more about the journey. I talked about it with the editor and we kind of liked the idea of just including the stuff that may not be who I am now, because it's who I was when I wrote it. It's the evolution of me from being a single guy to starting to date my wife, to getting married, having kids. Hopefully that's what's interesting... to see not only what's changed, but also the voice that stays the same through all that 10 or 15 years.

What was the editing process like for you?

It was very interesting. I gave the editor a lot of control. I mean, he ran everything by me, but I really trusted him and that made the whole process very easy. I don't know how it would be if you had an editor whose sensibility you didn't trust or who didn't get what you were trying to do. But I think this guy really got it. There wasn't a lot of content editing. We weren't trying to mold it into any kind of narrative, or take essays and make it into more of a memoir. It really is a collection of essays. It reads like a memoir in the sense that they're all written by me, and it kind of follows my life over time, but each one is meant to be its own stand-alone. It was very interesting to have someone read all these things back to back in context of one another, when they've been written over the course of 10 or 15 years. I got a lot of comments back like, “You know you make a lot of jokes about hookers. You sure you want to do that? Like maybe one.” There are certain phrases I would use all the time, because I thought it was funny; and it was fine to use them all the time, you know, five years apart. So it was interesting to see the crutches I would rely on. It was kind of cool to be called out on that -- so cleaning up in that sense.

Are you exploring completely different territory now?

No, it's still very much the same actually, but my kids are getting older and I'm getting older and my life is getting a little more suburban and settled. And I'm more used to it. This book is about being grown up and not feeling prepared for that. But I'm getting closer to 50, and I think I'm fairly comfortable being an adult at this point.

Well that's good to hear, congratulations.

Thank you, I finally made it.

What I love about your writing is that you have a lot of comedy without losing the depth of what you're writing about. Is that something you're conscious of or is it just what you do?

I'm trying to be more conscious of it, mostly because here in Pittsburgh there's not the talent pool that there was in LA. So I have to coach. I get a lot of really good submissions that just aren't quite there, so I'm trying to get better at giving notes. I still do WordPlay as a comedy show but it has become much more of a storytelling show with hopefully some funny stories. They're always good stories, but I can't always get five funny ones. So I'm trying to find ways to do exactly what you're asking me. But to be honest because I started as a stand-up when I was 16 and I did that for a good 10 or 15 years before I started writing essays, the comedy was just part of how I thought about the world. Mostly with my essays I usually write a couple of the jokes first and then build the depth around it.

You do, still?

Yeah, for the most part. The really early ones all had a stand-up bit. I'd start with a bit and then work my way down. Because for me, I have to force and allow myself to slow it down and paint the picture and be more descriptive without worrying about making it funny. That's always a struggle for me when I'm writing.

But also I think a lot of the humor comes from the depths, it comes from it being very specific and very real. So doing both seems natural to me. Stuff that doesn't have any depth to it isn't that funny. I think you need both.

Can you give an example of how you started with a bit and then mined that further?

Yeah, I had this one bit about being Jewish, but I don't typically look Jewish. So I had this whole bit about how I was a “stealth Jew.” And I had a little song I would sing about how I would freak people when they would say something anti-Semitic and I would catch them. “But I'm a Jew!” It's a five-minute little bit. And I ended up writing a whole story about moving to Chicago and what it was like to be Jewish, especially outside of LA. You know, everyone in LA, if they weren't Jewish they knew what being Jewish is about. And then I moved to the Midwest and was questioned about it more; you know, if we celebrate Christmas or not? And what we did on Christmas? It's still a pretty funny story, but it started from just, “How can I write a story about using this 'Jew gag' that I have?”

What theme were you exploring?

It ended up being about what it means to be a minority. Being a Jew in LA you're technically a minority but it feels very different than being Jewish in Pittsburgh or in the Midwest where you actually feel like you're “the other.” So there are different layers to that minority status that I don't think I was aware of having grown up in Los Angeles.

Have you gotten involved in the literary scene in Pittsburgh? Did you continue WordPlay out there?

Yeah, I did. It was one of the draws of moving here. I pretty quickly got WordPlay up and running again, within six months. I started talking to a few theaters and found this one theater. They helped me navigate the grants. There's a lot of money out here; a lot of people call it “guilty steel money.” There's the Carnegie Foundation, the Frick Foundation and there's a cultural trust - basically all of these sources of great arts funding - and the money has really been earmarked for the arts. So even in recessions and hard times it's still a decent pool of money for the arts. This theatre helped me put together a grant proposal and I got a small grant to kick off the show. The grant was basically to help us fund, I think, three shows to get it off the ground and try to get momentum for it. I got to pay myself. I got to pay all the performers.

Is it still doing well?

So yeah, we're doing another one in March. It's going to be our 13th one here. After a couple of years the theater basically took it on as part of their regular season. So at the end of every year I meet with them, we pick out the dates and we plan on our season.

I also host The Moth StorySLAM here. I got very lucky. It was the fourth city they started story slams in. I moved here in April, in August they started; so they were gearing up and actively looking for a host. And the people who were helping to bring it here had happened to see me at another event in town.

How cool...

It's really the best gig. I love it. For that I don't do any producing. I really just show up. And they do it at this like beautiful old theater. It seats like three hundred people. It's great. I love it.

As you know, many writers would love to publish a collection of essays. Do you have any advice for them?

Yeah, move to a smaller town and then use your local press.

To learn more about Alan Olifson, visit themanchild.net

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A Conversation with Wendy Sachs

It seems appropriate to kick off this New Year with stories and words of empowerment. My dear friend from college, Wendy Sachs, has written a book Fearless and Free: How Smart Women Pivot--and Relaunch Their Careers -- to be released by AMACOM on February 7th -- with the aim of emboldening women and infusing them with confidence as they navigate the workplace and their personal lives. With the Women's March on Washington happening this weekend, it could not be more timely!

You can read our conversation below, in which she offers some great tips and tools that you can apply right away. I hope that any readers might also consider passing this along to your female counterparts!

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WENDY SACHS is an Emmy award-winning network television producer, former Capitol Hill press secretary, editor-in-chief of Care.com, media relations executive, and the author of Fearless and Free: How Smart Women Pivot and Relaunch their Careers. The book will be published by AMACOM in February 2017. 

Wendy is also the author of the critically acclaimed book on balancing career and family, How She Really Does It: Secrets of Successful Stay-at-Work Moms (Da Capo, 2005). 

As a media executive, Wendy has represented companies ranging from tech start-ups to NBC Universal. Through the lens of smart storytelling, Wendy effectively connects with audiences and grows the awareness of an individual, a business or a brand.

A journalist and blogger, Wendy is an expert on work/life issues and has appeared on dozens of radio and TV shows including: NBC's "Today" show, ABC's "Good Morning America," MSNBC, CBS, FOX News, CNN's "Headline News" and others. She is a contributor to CNN.com and the Huffington Post and has written for the New York Times and several magazines.

Karin: How did your new book 'Fearless and Free' come about? 

Wendy: So I've had ten thousand jobs, so that's what really inspired this book. I just keep trying to stay relevant. I mean, the whole point of my book is that I've been hustling, because as the media and technology have disrupted careers over the past five years, it's really blown up everything; so many people in media and traditional media lost their jobs. It's all about social media; everyone's really young with millennials entering the workforce now and everyone being so much cheaper to hire than me. I have been interviewing, going into social media firms, looking around - what's hot, what's growing. Just trying to stay in the game and also realizing everyone who's interviewing me is 29 years old. It's the craziest phenomena; everyone for an entire year, every interview I had was by someone who graduated from college in 2009. And I kept doing the math, and I was like, what is with that?

So all of this had been marinating my head. What do we need to do to stay relevant? How do women, particularly the Gen-Xers - women who've taken themselves out of the workforce and are trying to get them back in - what can we do? How do you get a job? And how do you stay current and do something that is still marketable? How do we re-brand ourselves?

Where did you go to find the answers?

So I started looking at technology. I'm very into technology and the Silicon Valley companies that blow up and get huge. What are the secrets there? I started looking at lessons of the Silicon Valley - like these founders whose companies totally fail, then get hired to run new companies because the venture capitalists are investing not in the company but the people. So that's interesting - how do we get someone to invest in me again?

So then there's the idea that women don't take risks the way men do. And we suffer from more inertia because we want it to be perfect and we're afraid of failure and we only apply for jobs if we feel like we have 100 percent of the credentials; where studies show that men apply for jobs if they have 60 percent of the credentials. And how do we engineer our own serendipity? That's a big theme in Silicon Valley and a lot of creative agencies - they literally create cultures where serendipity can be manufactured. It's not just a happy accident that great things happen but it's like a collision of creatives. So how do we create that energy for ourselves? How do we learn to network better? Those were sort of all the themes that I started looking at.

What kind of tools, tips and advice do you offer women?

Women don't like to brag about themselves, they don't like to boast. So there's a new book that came out, Jessica Bennett's Feminist Fight Club that talks about having a 'Boast Bitch'. Everyone needs a Boast Bitch, someone to do it for you. It's super helpful, even if it's your mother -- anyone who is your person, who can help elevate you. Our friend Nikki is my boast bitch; when I have an article that comes out she's the one who posts, she's the one who brags about it.

That's the only reason I know about your book!

That's exactly right, and it works. It's really interesting.

So how do we amplify each others' voices? The Washington Post talked about this; with the women in the White House who realized in the early years of the Obama administration they were being left out of meetings. President Obama would ignore the women in the meetings. They weren't being included.

That's so surprising.

Yeah right, really interesting. So they got together and said, “OK so when Anna makes a point, we're all going to reiterate it and bring it back to Anna.” It's about saying, “As Anna pointed out earlier, I totally agree with that.” And they realized it worked. It was really subtle. They call it “The Amplification Effect.” And then Obama started actually asking these women directly more; he probably didn't even realize the unconscious bias that was happening.

So all of these small things are actually big things.

And then how do we also get out of our own small worlds? We know who we know, but it's about making the 'adjacent' possible. So you're reaching, you're pushing out of your comfort zone. You're going to places, new networking events that you wouldn't necessarily be going to, and you start expanding your circles.

I know you have a chapter devoted to your experiences of getting fired. How does that relate to the themes you're exploring?

This goes along with that whole embracing failure and the failure fetish of Silicon Valley. So these guys are either fired or their companies blow up, and yet they keep going on. I interviewed a few high-profile women aside from talking about my own firing. Jill Abramson from the New York Times, who is the first and only female executive editor - top of the mantle at the Times - was very publicly fired two years ago. They just didn't like her. She'd been at the Times forever, and before that, The Washington Post. She is now teaching at Harvard, and she gave a very well-known commencement speech at Wake Forest days after she was fired. They assumed that she was not going to want to do it. She was like, “Hell yeah, I'm doing this. I'm not going down thinking that they kicked me to the curb and I'm done” and she gave this amazing speech. Now she's at Harvard doing a big book with a million dollar book deal - and she's 62 years old.

And the woman who is the founder of Girls Who Code - Reshma Saujani - she's incredible. She's everywhere now; she's doing TED talks and all of that. But she ran for Congress and lost in a landslide. She ran again for public advocate in New York, lost again in a landslide. She ran for something else, lost. She applied to Yale Law School three times before she got accepted. She has an incredible story. And then she founded Girls Who Code a few years ago, and it just took off. So the theme is almost “lean into failure.” Not that we want to fail so bad that it just destroys our souls. But how do you grow from it? Not to be so afraid. It's all in the risk-taking where we grow confident. So the biggest piece... there's a chapter on confidence... is how do we become more confident? How do we let ourselves take risks? Because you need to take some risks to move forward and to grow and to not be so scared and to be OK that it fails. And to move on from it. There are plenty of things that I have failed at, aside from just getting fired, just other endeavors - documentaries I've tried to make, another book I tried to write. Things that just don't happen.

What is fascinating is that I have friends who always assume, “It all works out for me.” I'm like, “You don't get it. You're not seeing all of the failures; you're just seeing the success. You don't understand all of this hard work that goes into it. For two years now I've been working on a book.” Most people didn't know for two years I was working on a book; it took me nine months to write a book proposal, and I was working a full-time job at the time. So they only see me with the headline, or whatever, I put out on Facebook; they don't see all the blood sweat and tears that go into it. And that's what it takes; none of it is easy.

Are you suggesting that some people only see the successes in their lives and don't acknowledge their failures?

I think that we live in a world of Instagram and Facebook where everything has a filter on it. And so there's a lot of Facebook envy and stuff like that that happens, until you start peeling off the layers. That's why I love the women in my book - on the one hand, look at this woman Reshma who's beautiful and she's 40 years old and she's a TED speaker. And she has a book out and she's running Girls Who Code which is an incredible organization with ambitious goals of getting women and girls coding - like a million of them coding - in the next few years. It's like, wow, it's total unicorns and sunshine. And then she talks about her miscarriages as she's running for office, and her huge failure when she ran for office, how humiliated she felt, and just all of the stuff that went in. And you're like, “Wow, and you still pulled through, you rose from the ashes. That's extraordinary.” And so, I think it's understanding what success looks like. It can be really small, too, the little steps that you take to move forward. You should be proud. You should be celebrating.

Also, I think that our generation - certainly our mother's generation - as we were coming up through the workforce, we really felt like there was only a small space for women at the top. We weren't really raising each other with us. I don't want to say we were climbing over each other; I don't think anyone was that aggressive. But I don't think we were actively lifting each other. I think we were out there on our own, all sort of scrambling to get ahead. And now there's more of a movement, a sisterhood, of knowing that we should be raising each other together, which is almost a millennial type of a thing that's happening. I talk about that, too - the importance that there's plenty of room for cream at the top. There's plenty of space for all of us.

I even thought that when my first book came out. There were a few other books coming up at the same time and I was really upset by that. I was like, “Oh my god, they're going to get all the attention,” rather than realizing, “Why don't I reach out to these authors? Maybe we could figure out ways to team up together and do events together. We're stronger in numbers.” So there's a whole other movement happening.

In this chapter I have on networking, one of the women I interviewed is Shelley Zalis. She's Los Angeles-based; she's amazing, you may know her. She was the CEO of a research company for a long time, sold her business and made $80 million selling her business. A few years ago she launched something called The Girls' Lounge, which has gotten a lot of attention. The Girls' Lounge emerged when she would go to conferences like CES (Consumer Electronics Show) and Cannes and she would feel so incredibly alone; it was an all boys' club type of thing. So she sent out a note at CES maybe five or six years ago and mentioned this whole Girls' Lounge and word got out and she invited everyone to come to her hotel room. And then it grew and grew and grew to like a hundred women, and she got into a bigger suite. They all walked the floor of CES together; it was like “power of the pack” and it has launched this whole Girls' Lounge thing for her. She does these pop-up girls' lounges at these big news conferences now.

They'll do makeovers and they do silly girl stuff, but they also are doing empowerment messaging and it's a space for women, now evolving into something bigger. And soon, because her background is in research, she's coming out with this handbook of equality in the workplace. She has really become very big with gender parity in the workforce and raising women, and the power of all of that, which is a super timely thing that's happening because corporate America realizes they're losing all this female talent and they're trying to integrate women back, and they're trying retain women so they don't leave when they become moms. There's a huge movement to have more gender diversity because the past 10 years we've seen a huge loss of it. So I write about that, too, because that's a piece of my old book also - what happens when women leave the workforce? Now they're trying to re-enter and what are companies doing?

You mentioned that millennials have a different way with each other as women. Can you explain that more?

Well, I think that there's more of an awareness of a sisterhood. First of all, I think with millennials there's definitely arguably more of a sense of entitlement. They want what they want. And they're expecting that when they have kids, they'll still work and they're going to work on their own terms; that the workforce will figure it out for them and they will have to accommodate them. They also don't want to work their asses off the way we did and they want more balance and they're expecting their partners to be taking paternity leave and standing up for that. And they're much more culturally sensitive to having a diverse workforce and color in their workforce, and all these things that I think most white women weren't really paying attention to, like, “Oh, where are the black people?” No one was really saying that. “Where are the Hispanic people? Where are the lesbians?” Now in any office, gender diversity and just diversity in general is very much a focus.

The reality though is that a lot of dads are still not home at night, and women are the ones who generally slow down their careers. But as Shelley Zalis said, “The rules didn't work for me. So I changed the rules to accommodate me.” She went out and created her own company. She'd worked for Nielsen for a while and then another company and then created her own. She has three kids and she had a very family-focused culture and the business did really well and she was able to sell it for 80 million dollars. So her changing the rules to work for her and to make it more family-friendly didn't hurt the bottom line, it didn't hinder her. It grew her business because people are happy and there was loyalty and people didn't leave.

You know, there are all different pieces to it. It's about becoming more confident; it's also about how we present. I don't know if you followed this whole 'sorry, not sorry' thing over the past year. There's a lot of emphasis on women apologizing; women apologize all the time. Panteen did a great ad about it and then this woman came up with this G-mail plug that will scrub your e-mail, basically alert you like a spell check every time you say “sorry” or “just” or “actually” - different, what they call “shrinker” words where we're hedging a bit because we don't want to come off too strong, because we don't want to come off as too bitchy. So I'm really hyper aware now about how I talk.

I see you as quite direct and confident and bold with your language and your presentation. So really, even Wendy has to work on this?

Oh God, yeah, we all do. What happened was... while my boss really liked me, other people didn't. I was working virtually; the company was based in Boston I was in New York, and so I would have a lot of phone calls and conference calls and she knew me in person and we got along beautifully. But she said, “People think you're a little too brash, can you just dial it back? They're not seeing you smile and they're not seeing your body language.” In person I'm very touchy and I'll touch you. In any case, it was a technology company I was working at; it was a startup. And there are all these studies about how women are really scrutinized at tech companies and startups, and in the reviews there are words like “brash” and “bitchy” and this is very, very common. She even told me - and it was a woman CEO - to keep my head down. And I thought, “Really?” By the way I was the editor-in-chief, the spokesperson for the company. I was going on TV talking about the company. Why would I be keeping my head down and why can't I just be direct?

But when women are direct, like Hillary Clinton - I write about Hillary Clinton a lot in this chapter - we're not well-liked; it's this whole double-bind that women face. The double-bind is that if you come off as too smart and too direct, you're not well-liked. If you're well-liked as a woman, you're not thought of as really smart and a leader - all those leadership qualities that we seek in men. Even Bernie Sanders who could be pounding the podium and thrusting his finger... Hillary Clinton was criticized for not smiling enough. No one was telling Bernie to smile. And that's the double bind that women face. So after that experience where I was told, “You're too this, you're too that. We think you're really smart, but it's a personality thing.” I was so horrified, so heartbroken. I couldn't believe people thought I was such an asshole. And so, at my next job I started doing what one of my friends/colleagues would do. I write about her... she's blonde and she's petite and she would say, “sorry, sorry, sorry” and it really worked for her. And so I started adopting this whole “sorry” thing. I was working at a company called Grey Advertising, which is a big global agency. There I was with hot shot ad guys, it's totally Mad Men, and they have huge egos and I would just be like, “Sorry, can I ask you a question, sorry.” I was apologizing for just being there and taking up space. It was crazy, but it worked really well. And no one thought I was arrogant. I was much more passive. I was not really myself but no one thought that I was mean. I was working in this content division, and ironically, they did the “Sorry” Pantene ad. When I was there the ad came out, and I was like, “Okay, I'm done with sorry.” So women have this double bind. What is it that we can do? How can we be perceived as warm enough and nice enough, but also leaders?

So I give some tips that I got from other people. Even in an e-mail, how you can come across as warm and friendly - like you open and close your e-mails with some warmth and some connection but scrub the “just” and “actually,” and never apologize in an e-mail, even if you did something really wrong. Pick up the phone and call - you don't want to have an e-mail trail; certain things that we should just know. And then funny enough, my friend, the blonde pretty, cute, petite girl who would say “sorry” - I interviewed her about all of her sorry's and she said she started dropping that too because it was pointed out to her by one of her colleagues that she was apologizing all the time. He said, “Don't apologize, you haven't done anything wrong. You've got to stop that.” He was giving her good critical advice, you know, a more senior person, and he said, “You're even apologizing for things you haven't done.” But that was her mechanism, to deflect, fall on the sword, basically, take the blame even when she wasn't responsible because she wanted to calm everyone down. So there are lots of good takeaways.

It's really very much about trying to empower women, pulling all the layers off of all the different elements of what we need to do from how we can grow confidence in 'how we present ourselves with confidence' to 'how we fake it until we make it confidence'. Some of that is pretending a little bit until you own it. For people who are afraid to get up in front of an audience, you just have to keep getting up until you master that a little bit more. So you fake it at first and then it becomes more natural and then you get it. It's about taking those risks, creating moments of opportunity, and filling in the gaps when we need to.

To learn more about Wendy Sachs, visit wendysachs.com

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A Conversation with Lorien McKenna

Before we all become immersed in the holidays, I want to share my illuminating conversation with Lorien McKenna who worked deep inside story development at Pixar for more than 10 years. She offers some valuable insight around how to think about and approach story structure. Lorien is now based in Los Angeles and offers story and script consulting services. So if you are looking for feedback on a completed screenplay, I highly recommend reaching out to her!

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LORIEN McKENNA is a screenwriter and story consultant. She specializes in Story and Script Development for both studios and writers, helping them find the best version of their story. Her studio experience includes 10 years at Pixar Animation Studios in Story Development (RATATOUILLE, UP, BRAVE, INSIDE OUT, THE GOOD DINSOSAUR), Paramount as a Development Producer, and REELFX Animation Studios as a Story Consultant.

In 2015, along with Meg LeFauve and Chris Whitaker, she sold and wrote a TV Comedy based on the foibles of parenthood for WBTV/NBC. She is also a mentor and judge for the Cinestory Foundation in both the TV/Digital and Feature Retreats.

Lorien has a BA in English Literature & Performing Arts and an MFA in Playwriting from St. Mary's College of California. 

Karin: Could you share a bit of your background before joining Pixar?

Lorien: So I got my MFA in playwriting at St. Mary's College and I studied with Octavio Solis; and right after school a group of us wanted to keep writing together so we formed our own little writing group. Octavio would come and run a group for us. I think we paid him $25. We had a free space in the Mission in San Francisco. As women playwrights in San Francisco in 2001 it was hard to get our work out there. You think, “I'm going to get my MFA in playwriting and the world will open up to me.” Ha-ha-ha. Right? So four of us formed a theater company called Guilty Theater and we wrote and produced our own work, which was great. And I started teaching at St. Mary's; I taught theater and Shakespeare and writing and lots of drama classes in the Bay Area, to kids and this amazing class of retired people at Parks and Rec in Pleasanton. Teaching them Hero's Journey was a mind-blowing experience. It was the best. I loved it so much. 

Why?

Because they were so willing to be students and they were so willing to be seen; their hunger to be seen was so beautiful and tragic at the same time. I think we all have that as artists. But these 70-year-old people wanted to be writers and so I would see them as writers, and they showed up and did the work, which for me is one of my baseline requirements in storytelling. You must show up and you must do the work. I'm not going to do it for you, and you cannot let other people do it for you.

And meanwhile I was working full time in San Francisco and acted in community theater plays. A woman in a play worked at Pixar and she said, “There is a job available, we need a temp.” There was an intern who only worked on Fridays and she was taking six weeks off. So they needed a temp for an intern who only worked on Fridays.

And I was like, “Excuse me but I am a 34-year-old adjunct professor at St Mary's College. I am not a temp.” But I went home and my husband said, “You better turn around and go work at Pixar” because he loves animation so much. So I was like, fine. So I worked in marketing temping and then I applied for a job. They wanted me to apply for the director's assistant position on Ratatouille. And I said, “No way, I don't want to be an assistant.” So my track at Pixar is everything they wanted me to do, I said “no” to, is what happened. I'm just like Elizabeth Bennett, the power of no. So I was the director's assistant and then I was the script supervisor on 'Up' which was my first movie, and I did 'story' on Brave, Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur.

What are you biggest takeaways from working at Pixar?

So in theater I hated rehearsal. I loved performing. I just hated doing the work of going to rehearsal but I loved being on stage. What I learned at Pixar is that it's about the work; it should be about the rehearsal. It should be about learning the craft and understanding the craft; that it's not just about the thrill of finishing and being on stage. At Pixar these movies take so long, you have to show up every day and pay attention. And at the time Pixar hired incredible people; everyone was gifted. So I was used to showing up and being like, “Oh my god you're the best.” And they're like, “Great, what do you got?” I had to elevate my game at every turn. So I always had to be learning, always had to be paying attention. 

I got my MFA but I didn't understand story structure until I started working at Pixar, because as a playwright I took workshops from Marie Irene Fornes and Cherrie Moraga... it's very like 'just write your pain, write the poetry of your feelings', which is not about story structure.

With each film I worked on it just became more and more ingrained in me. At first I resisted, right? Structure is a formula. But really what I learned, and as I continue to learn more about structure... as a writer it's your contract with your audience. You're saying, “I'm going to take you on a journey, I'm going make you cry, make you laugh, I'm gonna rip your guts out, but I've got you. I'm in control. I'm going to bring you back safely.” And so that was the gift of Pixar for me. Nobody there whips out Save the Cat or Joseph Campbell. We talk about Star Wars. We reference films, we reference characters and journeys that resonate with a particular film a lot. Star Wars comes up every day. There's a Star Wars jar; if you mention it, you put a dollar in the jar. 

It's interesting because storytellers at Pixar tell those stories from their pain and their personal experience, and yet there are so many checkpoints in process and so many people who understand storytelling just so fundamentally that it just sort of naturally happens. There's a way that it just becomes part of the language. I didn't even know I was learning it until I actually did. I learned structure in such a way that was so inside the process, as I was doing it; the exercise of building these films and rebuilding them and rebuilding them and rebuilding them for years in story is what taught me what I know about structure as opposed to reading a book and trying to apply it to what I'm writing.

So would they talk about structure in terms of a character's journey?

It's all about character; it's always all about character, because you're creating the character out of nothing and then someone has to design the character and then build the puppet in the computer and then rig it, make it come alive. The Pixar movies, they're all character driven. When they say 'story is king' at Pixar that means the storytelling process and that it's rooted in character.

It gets pretty intense what goes on at Pixar in the Story department. I mean it is emotional and personal and specific to someone's story. And at the peak there's like 350 people working on that movie. So all those people are working on that one person's story. So it's really vulnerable and precious and terrifying.

Does it really come down to what's personal to one person or are there other people chiming in?

Of course other people are chiming in, but it's that singular vision. Like Pete Docter's daughter who is this goofy, charming kid who liked old 50s and 60s movies and Disneyland. Pete's exactly like that, they're passionate artist people. And then his daughter turned 12 and shut him out. And so he was like, “What's happening in her head? What happened?” And that is what Inside Out is about; it's literally a moment he had and his story. And of course all of us were parents on the film, and you know, everybody's been a kid so everybody brings something to it that magnifies it and amplifies Pete's vision. I always thought things were the most healthy at Pixar when people were able to amplify that vision; and of course that amplification can be as a challenge as long as everyone understands what that vision is. Usually the director comes up with an idea and then that's the movie that gets made, which is what I loved about theater too. And which is why Pixar felt great to me because it's collaborative and loud and messy and fun and challenging and personal. It's all the things that are about being in a play. Some of the people get to be on stage; some of the people are backstage. You know, there are people making costumes and people who are the actors and there's somebody who's written it. And you work out the kinks and it felt a lot like theater to me, which is why I loved it so much. Some of my best friends I met at Pixar because of what you go through there.

So now you're living in Los Angeles, and in addition to writing and consulting for studios, you coach screenwriters. What is your approach?

When I work with writers I'm developing the writer as much as the project because I'm interested in developing their skillset not just fixing the screenplay. That for me is really important because what I'm saying isn't groundbreaking, like “Your midpoint's in the wrong place or your third act isn't earned.” Nothing I say is new. But I think it's my connection with the writer, how I'm delivering the message and making it personal; I think that's why people want to work with me, because they can learn stuff about themselves. I mean some people are literally writing about their own personal stories and don't realize it.

Do you work primarily with screenwriters?

I have so far only worked with screenwriters, TV and feature screenplays, and I prefer for someone to show up with a script. I really like to respond to a piece of work. I read so many screenplays, I guess I'm most comfortable with that.

What about playwriting?

Playwriting, yes, I love to work with playwrights. I read a screenplay recently, and I'm like, “This is written by a playwright,” I can just tell. I love plays.

You also offer something unique called 'story hikes' where you read the work and discuss it out on the trail. How has that been going?

I did quite a few of them and they were amazing. I learned a lot because I am not an athletic person, I don't hike. I think I've been on one hike on purpose before I started story hikes. So it was sort of an interesting way that came about. I have high cholesterol and so to change my lifestyle I thought, I'll take people on story hikes and do what I do and get exercise. I kind of thought it was a silly idea, but it's actually really cool because normally in a story consult you sit across the table, you're looking at them. It's a little confrontational, right? They show up open and vulnerable to you and you critique their work which is essentially about them. I mean no matter what the work is you are talking about them as a writer and artist. 

So what's interesting about the story hikes is that you show up in your workout clothes, which is different than a regular meeting. It's great because you can talk about things and you're not looking at the person. So they're looking over there, I'm looking over here. I can be talking, they're listening. Everyone that I hike with gets emotional, some people cry, because we end up talking about complicated stuff about their writing and themselves as writers. The most profound thing I noticed, though, is when we're going uphill you're leaning forward and you're working harder and trying to talk and breathe, that's when the problems come out. That's when we're talking about what needs to be fixed, what the notes are, questions. And then on the downhill, because you have to lean back a little bit, your chest opens up and you're sort of looking up, it's when people start finding solutions. It's really interesting and it's kind of beautiful.

What advice do you often find yourself giving writers?

You know I'm a mentor at Cinestory, and on this last feature retreat, it was the final day and everybody was giving advice, and I just had this moment of like, “This is really hard. I still struggle with whether or not I'm a writer. What does it mean to be a writer?” I'm a mentor there, and I think for me it was important to share that. For me being a writer is such a vulnerable and powerful thing, I'm getting emotional right now talking about it. I think I will struggle with it always, no matter what happens.

To learn more about Lorien McKenna, visit lorienmckenna.com

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