Today we’d like to introduce you to Heidi Hornbacher.
Hi Heidi, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
When my husband and I graduated from UCLA screenwriting, we felt like we had a great base. I did well in a screenplay contest but then nothing really happened. Over the years, we started seeing gaps in what we understood about the craft and we wanted to fill in those gaps. My husband is Italian and through him, I got my citizenship too. I’ve always been obsessed with Italy. So we started taking groups of writers to Italy to workshop scripts with our favorite professors which seemed like a cool idea – who doesn’t want to go write in Italy?
Meanwhile, I had gone from being a contest reader to co-founding the Slamdance script clinic and was seeing the same issues in scripts over and over. Wanting to teach came out of a desire to read better scripts and to help writers avoid simple mistakes. After a while, we had synthesized a curriculum based on what we saw working across genre and format (TV and film) and we took over the teaching in Italy ourselves. We started to see more and more of our alumni win contests like the Nicholl and get industry recognition like Emmy awards so we knew we were onto something good.
Then COVID happened right when we had started our first in-person version of the Italy retreat in LA. We pivoted to Zoom and a whole new world opened up. It’s been such a thrill to have classes with, for example, someone in Korea, someone in Egypt, someone in the UK, and folks all over the US. That never would have happened if we were just in person here. I just got back from the Austin Film Festival with one of our alums from New York who I never would have met otherwise. She won the Women in Animation fellowship last year through Roosterteeth with a script from our workshop and it was a joy to see her soaking it all in.
Having started absolutely backwards by offering our big fancy thing first in the Italy retreat, We now have a more accessible and affordable online curriculum to serve writers in complete script development workshops, rewriting workshops, and one-off sessions taught by industry friends like how to succeed in your first writer’s room job, how to built a great pitch deck fast, and how to avoid legal pitfalls as a writer.
I’m proud of what we basically willed into being out of nothing from the desire to hang out with writers and help everyone elevate their craft. I mean, that’s Hollywood, right? Willing things into being from nothing. It’s helped my own writing too!
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
COVID was definitely a challenge that turned out to be a blessing in disguise like I said. Outreach is definitely a challenge. We’ve always been a word-of-mouth company which has kept our growth slow. That’s fine because we develop a relationship with everyone in our workshops. But it’s a challenge in finding ways to speak about what we do and what we offer that don’t sound canned. There are a lot of “consultants” out there that are happy to take hopeful writers’ money and don’t really help forward their work so there is a balancing act to not be lumped in with them.
Beyond that, it’s just time. Trying to run social media and marketing, scheduling, evaluating class applications, developing new courses, and actually teaching is a lot on top of trying to get my own stuff written. But I don’t think it’s any more than anyone else hustling in Hollywood deals with.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about PageCraft Writing?
We built PageCraft from the ground up by responding to what writers told us they wanted and what we saw working and not working out in the world. As the lead instructor and course developer, I specialize in helping writers elevate their craft and unlocking that thing that can help get their script recognized.
I like to think we’re unique in the way we teach from building character psychology and story structure. In truth, there’s nothing new under the sun but we are good at conveying information in a way that reaches different learners. I’ve had more than one writer say something like “I sort of knew that but now I really get it in a way I never did. Now I get how to use it in my writing.”
I’m proud of the one-on-one relationships we cultivate with our writers. Our goal has always been to create a community where they can always lean for support. I’m also proud of our BIPOC writer scholarship. That came out of the whole COVID Zoom pivot and George Floyd. An alumna who is a woman of color called me to ask what we were doing about it all and I started talking about books I was reading and marches I went to and she said “no, PageCraft. What is PageCraft doing?” I realized we could do so much more to amplify and develop voices of color so we partnered with American Latino Theatre and created our scholarship program. It just makes all of it better – the stories we all get to hear now.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
We’ve taken some risks that have taught us a lot. We sometimes come up with offerings and put a lot into them and writers don’t respond to them. We just keep learning more about what our community wants and it ultimately helps us but it can be a bit of a cold shower when we’ve put time and money into creating something that doesn’t find its place. To that end, I think taking risks can be a great educator.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://pagecraftwriting.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pagecraftwriting/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PageCraftwriting
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/PageCraftwrite
Image Credits
Carlo Cavagna/Heidi Hornbacher