Collegiate Times

As an author, English professor Matthew Vollmer understands that research is an important part of writing any piece. For the title story of his soon-to-be-published collection of short stories, "Future Missionaries of America," his search found him with a learning tool he never thought he'd be researching. The story features a teenage girl who is assigned by one of her classes to look after a robotic baby with her friend who is a fundamentalist Christian. Though she herself is not spiritual, she has feelings for this boy who plans to be a missionary as soon as he graduates.

"For the title story," said Vollmer, "I was talking about robotic babies. There's this thing called real baby, I think it's called real baby; I can't remember what it's called, but there's a company that makes these things and I asked them (to borrow one). Because I was an educator they sent me this DVD and this booklet that had a cross-section view of the baby and how it was used and all the products you could buy for it and how it could be programmed. That was really helpful."

Vollmer is among the many teachers at Virginia Tech who are also published authors. He teaches creative writing and freshman English and helps graduate teaching assistants. He started writing his first story for the collection in 1997, and by 2001 had enough for a collection but did not feel it was quite ready to be sent out.  

To test the story's worth, Vollmer would send a newly finished story to multiple literary magazines to see whether they would be accepted. Institutions such as "The New Yorker Review," "Paris Review" and "Tin House" show the worth of authors' writing by deciding to let them into their pages. All the stories in Vollmer's collection -- except for one -- have been published in such types of literary magazines.

"With a story collection ... it's sort of different because most of these stories have been through a vetting process where they get sent to a magazine," Vollmer said. "Some of the editors actually edit the story, and some editors will be like, 'OK, I'm just taking this story,' and they just put it in there the way it is."

This process of proving a piece's worth is similar in the screenplay world. Carl Bean, who also teaches creative writing, has been exclusively focused on filmmaking and screenplay writing in the last few years. Already a published author of several novels, he is currently working on a film documentary about Edgar Allan Poe with an undergraduate student that is slated for completion by the end of the semester. He is also enrolled in a professional certificate course in the New School in New York City and participates in workshops at the Film Institute in Maryland.

To see whether a screenplay has promise, screenwriters enter them into contests.

"For screenwriters, you either go to a famous film screenwriting school and then someone there says, 'Here's an inside,' or you have to go through the steps and go through contests and things like that," Bean said.

One of Bean's screenplays, titled "Flight," has been seeing positive results in recent contests.  

"I've been doing pretty well," Bean said. "I've won a couple of monthly contests, but I haven't won a major big contest, but I've placed in some major contests."

If a screenplay  shows enough potential, a production company will pick up the writer. Most of the time, the company expects an author to come with a substantial amount of prime material. According to Bean, the number is around 10, with each screenplay consisting of a full 120 pages; each page equates to a minute of film.

"Why I was drawn to screenplays," Bean said, "is because there's no room to play. You have to have a good story, but you don't have unlimited room to tell that story. You have to tell it within a certain space, and things have to happen within that space at certain times, and you have maybe a minute to two minutes to make it happen."

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