This text appeared within the July 3, 2025 version of The Movie Remark Letter, our free weekly publication that includes authentic movie criticism and writing. Join the Letter right here.

Kwaneta Harris. Photograph courtesy of Ariana Gomez.

Each morning at 4 a.m., when the jail remains to be cloaked in darkness and silence, I get up to work on my screenplay. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, harsh and unforgiving, as I fastidiously take away my treasured assortment of screenwriting books from below my skinny mattress, the place I preserve them secure from occasional shakedowns by guards.

Syd Subject’s Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting and The Screenwriter’s Workbook, together with Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, have grow to be my private bibles on this concrete wilderness the place creativity struggles to survive. The dog-eared pages of those books signify my escape, my rise up, and my willpower to inform tales that matter, particularly when the system expects me to stay unvoiced.

For practically 18 years, I’ve known as a jail in Texas “house,” with eight and a half of these years spent within the suffocating isolation of solitary confinement with out a tv. My incarceration started simply as the primary iPhone was being launched to the world, a coincidence that symbolizes the technological chasm between my actuality and yours. The final cellphone I ever used was a primary digital camera cellphone, and the final film I watched in a cinema was The 40-12 months-Outdated Virgin (2005). Whereas society has developed by way of a number of technological revolutions, I’ve been frozen in time, left to surprise what a world dominated by social media, streaming companies, and fixed connectivity even seems to be like.

Regardless of this disconnection—or maybe due to it—my creativeness has flourished. Although my circumstances may appear insurmountable to most aspiring screenwriters, I refuse to let partitions and steel bars dictate the boundaries of my creativity. My fascination with screenwriting springs from my childhood, surrounded by great-grandparents who couldn’t learn however wielded the ability of oral storytelling like grasp craftsmen. These elders handed down narratives the best way most individuals of shade have preserved their histories—by way of voice, rhythm, and the sacred act of remembering. As an solely little one blessed with an overactive creativeness, tales turned my sanctuary, my technique of setting up secure areas in my thoughts when my bodily setting provided none.

This got here in useful throughout these eight years in solitary confinement. Disadvantaged of tv or leisure, I created elaborate exhibits in my thoughts. This inner cinema turned my survival mechanism, instructing me that storytelling isn’t simply leisure; additionally it is resistance. These experiences laid the inspiration for my present screenplay, a coming-of-age drama that follows three teenage ladies navigating the complexities of rising up in an setting the place childhood ends abruptly and survival turns into an artwork kind.

When non-incarcerated screenwriters battle with jargon like “loglines” or “beat sheets,” they will merely Google the terminology or be a part of a writers’ group for clarification. I’ve no search engine at my fingertips. What’s a “colorist”? It was information to me to study that it ain’t bought nothing to do with Clairol hair dye! As an alternative, it’s an expert who enhances the visible aesthetic of movies by way of shade correction and grading, one thing I found on web page 237 of an outdated film-production handbook that was donated to my facility by the Books to Prisoners program.

Inside these partitions, even probably the most primary screenwriting instruments are luxuries that the majority take as a right. In Texas, jail libraries have joined the decision to ban something having to do with crucial race principle, range, fairness, inclusion, and express intercourse. There aren’t any private televisions to buy for anybody incarcerated. No manner to get on-line or attain a pc. All I’ve is a $375 clear typewriter. I’m writing this text on it, as if I’m within the print period of Encyclopedia Britannica.

“INT. PRISON CELL – DAY” may be the one slugline I can write from direct expertise, whereas different writers casually craft scenes set in unique places they’ve really visited. When screenwriters speak about their “protection” getting constructive suggestions, they’re referring to skilled script evaluation—not the bedsheet I take advantage of to defend my writing from prying eyes. The “three-act construction” that Subject champions turns into a metaphorical lifeline in a spot structured completely by another person’s guidelines, whereas understanding the idea of “white house” on the web page feels paradoxical when all my precise bodily areas are white.

Amid the blaring bulletins over the PA system and the fixed cacophony of two,000 ladies navigating confined areas, discovering focus requires a self-discipline few civilian writers will ever want to develop. Most aspiring screenwriters would possibly complain concerning the perils of procrastination or author’s block when confronted with the distractions of social media or streaming companies. They haven’t any idea of attempting to preserve a inventive circulate when a cell extraction is occurring a number of doorways away, or when your “writing session” is interrupted by the obligatory prisoner rely six instances a day. But these restraints have solid in me an ironclad focus that I think would make even probably the most disciplined Hollywood author envious. Necessity turned the mom of my inventive invention.

Among the many biggest challenges I face is the near-impossible activity of staying culturally related whereas being culturally remoted. When Syd Subject discusses utilizing “standard movies as reference factors,” I’m confronted by the truth that my cultural information stopped evolving in 2007. I depend on my shabby copy of the screenplay of The Shawshank Redemption (1994) not simply as a template for formatting, but in addition as a report of one of many few movies I can really reference from reminiscence. My “analysis” consists of no matter books make it by way of the strict prison-mail system, whereas different writers casually stream films for inspiration or attend movie festivals.

The information hole is just not merely inconvenient; it’s a chasm that threatens to make my work outdated earlier than it’s even accomplished. Haunting my writing journey is the persistent voice of imposter syndrome, whispering that I, an incarcerated Black lady instructing herself a posh craft with out steerage, bought no enterprise dreaming of screenwriting success. How can I presumably compete with film-school graduates and business insiders once I don’t even know what I don’t know?

This worry is amplified by my consciousness of how tales coping with ladies like me have traditionally been informed not by us however about us, by way of lenses distorted by clichés and presumptions. The “character arc” of the incarcerated lady in mainstream media hardly ever extends past cautionary story or victimhood narrative, missing the nuance and humanity that solely lived expertise can present. The “subtext” of those misrepresentations, to borrow one other screenwriting time period, reinforces dangerous stereotypes and perpetuates techniques of oppression.

When others inform our tales, they typically deal with what Blake Snyder calls the “darkish evening of the soul” second, with out understanding the every day resilience and humanity that exist even in our darkest circumstances. Regardless of the acute obstacles of writing by hand (after which pecking it out on a typewriter) with out entry to screenwriting software program, navigating advanced formatting guidelines with out examples, growing cultural references with out experiencing tradition, and creating with out suggestions—I persist. The ability of storytelling rests upon its potential to encourage change by way of empathy. If we actually need to rework how marginalized folks in cages are portrayed, incarcerated of us have to be on the forefront, amplifying their very own experiences—particularly now, once we are all dwelling in a government-sanctioned and hyperpolarized setting of “us versus them.”

The “denouement” of my private narrative isn’t reaching “FADE OUT” on an ideal script. It’s understanding that with every phrase I write, every scene I craft, I’m reclaiming the ability to outline my very own story and I’m probably reshaping the narrative for numerous others whose voices have been silenced. So I’ll determine this out, one scene, one beat, one web page at a time, as a result of in a world that conspires to make me invisible, my screenplay is my declaration that I nonetheless exist, I nonetheless matter, and I nonetheless have one thing very important to say.

Publication of this essay was facilitated by Emily Nonko and Empowerment Avenue.

Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, enterprise proprietor, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist, from Detroit. Her writings have appeared in a variety of publications together with This American Life, Rolling Stone, and Teen Vogue. She writes on Substack at “Write or Die” and is engaged on a ebook concerning the youngsters from juvenile detention who have been her neighbors in grownup solitary confinement.