Writing Recognitions Stack Up For Nicolet Student

Based on the recent recognition Nicolet junior Maggie Beck’s writing has received, her goal of pursuing a writing career is the right call. 

Last month, the budding writer’s screenplay was accepted into Milwaukee Film’s Collaborative Cinema program, which is giving Maggie the opportunity to work with professional filmmakers, screenwriters, and teachers to develop a short script that will be eligible to be made into a film next summer.

 “I heard about Milwaukee Film's Collaborative Cinema program in my English 11 Honors class, taught by Kelly Saunders,” Maggie said.

 The significance of that English class is that a former student of Saunders, Nathaniel Schardin, a 2010 Nicolet grad, informed the class about the program when he appeared at the school on Halloween to screen the short film he directed, The Vampire Formerly Known as Dracula. The screenplay idea for Schardin’s Dracula drama, which had premiered at the Milwaukee Film Festival earlier in fall, had previously won the Collaborative Cinema contest.

 Maggie’s screenplay follows a bully named Rosalind who comes from an abusive background, but she does not perceive her treatment of other students her age as bullying. “The story challenges the audience to ask, “What is a victim? What is a bully? Are they really all that different?””

On Feb. 11, it was announced that Maggie had received an Honorable Mention from The Scholastic Writing Awards, a national program that sponsors regional competition, for her entry in the memoir category, Effort is Everything.

And in November, Maggie participated in National Novel Writing Month by writing a 50,000-word novel (about 200 pages). As a provision of the program, if she finishes editing her novel, The Mourning Paper, by the end of June, CreateSpace, an independent publisher owned by Amazon.com, will print five paperback copies of her novel for free.

 “I am most interested in pursuing writing as a career in some capacity. Whether that pursuit will lead to screenwriting or novel-writing, I am not completely sure,” Maggie said. “I do know that in the future I will continue to write simply for the love of writing.”