Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Grace Hansen. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Grace, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had started sooner?
During my undergraduate degree, I was fortunate enough to get an internship at Lionsgate Entertainment in their production and development department. That experience influenced me in many ways, but there were two that stood out most. First, I realized that there was a world where I stayed in Los Angeles at 21 years old and tried to work my way into a writers’ room through a series of assistantships. The second was, at that juncture of my life, if I’d done that I wouldn’t have anything to say if I did get the privilege of holding the pen. After my internship ended, I finished my bachelor’s degree and decided to go to law school. I worked as a prosecuting attorney on a Native American reservation and then as a teacher in a public high school, and I trusted that when the time came, my life would find its way back to stories. It has. And now I feel ready in a way I wouldn’t have ten years ago when I first got a taste of the creative life.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Before I show people my resume, I always warn them it’s a bit of a rollercoaster. I was a lawyer, a teacher, and a journalist before I moved to Los Angeles and got my MFA in screenwriting at the American Film Institute Conservatory. Those previous careers, which so often feel like whole other lives now, still inform everything I write. It’s important to me that stories, especially those people watch on screen, augment their viewers’ lives with humor, clarity, or perspective. Growing up, I watched Blue Bloods and Law and Order: SVU with my mother, sister, and grandmother. Those memories are core for me, especially now that my grandmother has passed away, and my main goal in this industry is to hopefully someday contribute to writing episodes that other families can enjoy and form traditions around together. My mom, who is a college professor, always told me and my sister that if she could read, write, walk, and spend time with us, then that would be enough. I think I’m still looking for my enough, but I know that telling fictional stories that impact real people’s lives for the better is part of it.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
I love thinking about society as an ecosystem, with all of us playing our essential roles in a grander scheme, probably in large part because I love nature, and this way of seeing the world reminds us that we are a part of it. However, I think for me the most productive way of viewing this question, as a creative, isn’t necessarily what society can do for creatives but what we can do for society. I think ideally, each element of an ecosystem has a respect for, or at least an awareness of, the importance of others’ roles as well. Often, since moving to LA, I’ve heard people disregard opinions that seem, for lack of a better term, less coastal. But the truth is, the places that so many of us tend to overlook, myself included, are still the majority of the audience. I want to tell stories that are accessible to people whose lifestyles and belief systems are different than my own precisely because I believe, if you’re telling the truth with fiction, then it should translate to a whole gamut of experience. And I think that if people see stories they recognize coming from storytellers they might have initially thought would be unrelatable to them, then we all become more aware of others and, in turn, more compassionate.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
In law school, I was taught that emotions are irrelevant to the truth. It’s not a new concept– Aristotle was the one that said, “The law is reason free from passion.” But during my three years of legal study and two years of practice, I began to believe it. I saw that perspective create clarity and precision. I saw that perspective win cases. Emotions, with their fickleness and their subjectivity, don’t impact fact in the legal sense, and so, I believed, they didn’t matter. But for me, there’s a danger in letting that philosophy permeate other areas of my life. It snuck into how I viewed relationships, and then later, how I viewed art. After starting the screenwriting program at AFI, I realized (with the help of some friends) that if I continued to let my foundational principle be that emotions are irrelevant, then I would never tell a story that felt true. I’m still working on this– it was pretty deeply ingrained– but every time I write something new, I remember that it is truly work worth doing.
Image Credits
Ysabeaux Ng