What You Can Learn From Arkay Garber
Who she is!
Arkay Garber wrote her first illustrated short story, The Kickel Family at age five, and she directed and starred in her first musical, Peter Pan, at age ten. She danced and painted in her teens at the NYC High School of Music and Art; she developed her passion for ballet by studying with the Balanchine School of American Ballet for ten years while attending Professional Children’s School and dancing with a ballet company.
During a long career as a secondary and university writing teacher in Ohio, Las Vegas, California, and NYC, she met hundreds of students who, like most of us, have a love for the medium of film and live theater. She decided to fulfill a lifelong dream of opening the Jerusalem Center for Artistic Development, Inc. (JCAD), a not-for-profit organization. And what better locale to realize that dream – Jerusalem, Israel.
Through JCAD, she has conducted 75 on-location screenwriting courses and Workshops at three Jerusalem venues. And she gives seminars and private online consultations on crafting great story for film, stage play, and novel, using screenplay techniques.
Credentials and stats
- B.S. in Education, English and French, from Kent State University, Ohio
- M.A. in English from Kent State University
- Screenwriting studies at UCLA and NYU
- Mentorships with master Hollywood screenwriting gurus to hone her craft
- Developed her own unique curriculum
Personal life
She currently resides in Jerusalem with her family and pets and enjoys meeting visitors from all over the world in a uniquely spiritual environment.
How you can learn from Arkay’s writing insights
Having spent a lifetime teaching the writing craft to both native and non-native students from all over the world and developing her own unique curriculum to help writers achieve their goals, her husband urged her to give book writing a try. A first novel, employing her unique system of incorporating screenwriting techniques is now in the works.
Through life’s journey, it’s never too late to tell a great story, incorporating blends of characters, both real and fictionalized with psychological and moral flaws that are unique, with personal adventures and challenges! Everyday stories about characters, striving, failing, falling, regrouping, and trying again! It’s life in technicolor!
What Arkay’s university students learned about writing
As Bette Davis famously said, “Getting old ain’t for sissies!” The same holds true for the writer. What job entails hours of thinking and typing with no clock, no master standing over one’s shoulders, nobody cracking the whip?
What job entails a response from naysayers who seriously doubt that anything really new and exciting could ever be written because once the wheel was discovered, everything else is anticlimactic?
Writing is a job. But it’s so much more than that. It can be therapy. It can be an escape. It can release creativity one never could have imagined. But it’s hard work, no doubt about that.
Editing is even harder. Ruthless editing can be seriously painful. But in the end, persistence, integrity, follow-through and an earned belief in oneself…And courage to write the truth, from the heart. These are big deals!
Reaching an audience who might never have been reached had they not turned the pages of the book, seen the film, or attended the live stage performance. That’s the greatest reward for a writer.
How can you make a good book, film, stage play stand out?
Stories that follow the mantras of “show, don’t tell,” and “moral argument through action” will remain possibly forever in the collective psyche: A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca, Hamlet, Gone With the Wind, Little Women, Blackhawk Down, Shooter, The Imitation Game, The King’s Speech, Schindler’s List, and on and on.
Life is genre specific. Horror films are loved by some, hated by others. Romantic Comedy, Science Fiction, Crime, etc. Which genre do readers/audiences love, which genre do readers/audiences hate?
The message is clear: Reach the reader/audience cathartically, so they walk away stunned, happy, sad, emotionally charged. It’s the reader/audience, not the writer’s ego that counts.
“The most important thing in writing is to finish.
A finished thing can be fixed.
A finished thing can be published.
A finished thing can be made into a movie…
An unfinished thing is just a dream.
And dreams fade if you don’t hold on tight enough.
So finish the thing.”
Robert Cargill