All the World´s a Stage – and Pavel Gotthard Wants to Write the Script

By Zuzana Botiková

Pavel Gotthard´s interest in scriptwriting is quite outstanding for a boy of his age. It inspires me, as I love theater and I am a great fan of fiction, either in novels or in the movies. I tried to find out, what is a boy trying to succeed in this field like.
In daycare, Pavel Gotthard would instruct his friends how to play astronauts. “I would command them to act and say the lines I thought to be appropriate.” Fifteen years later, Pavel Gotthard, now 21, still instructs people how to act, as he studies to become a scriptwriter and writes scripts in his free time. He is a young man, who, after graduating from a technical high school, decided to work with his imagination and built his future on it.
“I loved to write. Since childhood I wrote short stories. I would steel my father´s typewriter most of the time and pretend I was a writer. I truly enjoyed it.” The typewriter Gotthard used to steel was a heritage from his grandfather. Not that Gotthard´s father wouldn´t allow his son to write stories, but he thought the old typewriter was not a toy to play with.
Gotthard was only eight years old at that time and he loved to fancy his own fantasy worlds and characters. The easiest way to interact with these worlds was to write stories about them. These stories would usually be only one page long, and as Gotthard says: “not very readable.”
Today Gotthard is totally engaged in scriptwriting. Besides this being his main subject at the university, he writes scripts in his free time and sometimes even as a part-time job. He worked with the Czech Television production team on the project The Mystery of Tom Wizard. Now he waits for the Czech Television to produce a fairytale he wrote with one of his friends.
The scripts written in his free time are crucial to his big love, role-playing games, generally known under the abbreviation LARP. The abbreviation LARP stands for live action role-playing games.
Gotthard is a member of The Court of Moravia, which is a community that organizes LARP sessions for people of all age and occupancy. These people meet at some community center, get their new roles and act out their new characters. LARP can have various forms, although usually it is associated with great gatherings of people dressed up in costumes, who play big games in special exteriors.
Gotthard writes the scripts for those plays and together with his friends organizes events for a smaller number of people. They draw the themes for their interactive drama from various movies. Some of the themes, for instance, are gangsters from the 30´s, pirates, or polar expeditions. They produce the right atmosphere thanks to the dialogues and sometimes even some costumes. Their new game inspired by the French revolution takes place in a cellar.
Besides considering scriptwriting as a better source of income, Gotthard likes it more than writing novels. “To write a script is different than to write a novel, you don´t have to include so many descriptions of characters and places. It is far more dynamic and entertaining.”
However, when Gotthard was a teenager he still wrote short stories, which he published on a fantasy-oriented web page. These stories were read by his friends.
Actually, Martin Profant, his friend´s father and also a well known philosopher and a political adviser in the field of education, read some of them as well. According to his own words, he saw a writing potential in Gotthard, so he suggested Gotthard publish a book of his short stories, which, however, never happened. Gotthard explains this further: “I saw that the more I write the worse I think of my previous writings. Despite the number of my works, I never gathered the right amount of stories to be published.”
Profant did not want Gotthard to lose his interest in writing, so he recommended an art school. “I have no idea how could I get accepted, but surely the choice to go there was one of the best decisions in my life,” adds Gotthard.
Now he is studying scriptwriting for TV and radio at the Theatre faculty of Janáček Academy of music and performing arts in Brno. Without considering the fact that Gotthard ´s parents wanted to have a technical engineer out of their son, his choice of University may have seemed absolutely logical. As they often told him, “Man cannot make a living out of writing. It is very uncertain to get a job and it is not well paid at all.”
Gotthard did not have problems with following their instructions. At that time he was not clear on what he wanted to do. Therefore he attended a technical high school together with his older brother, studied to become a part of the building industry. “Now I see this qualification as a sort of insurance, if all my other dreams fail. I can always lay bricks,” he adds with a slight grin.
Martina Pelcová, a friend of Gotthard ´s, who has known him for five years, describes him as a romantic daydreamer. She says: “While the other boys at his age were rather pragmatic and technically oriented, he would walk with his head in the clouds.”
She used to play some role playing games with her friends. This actually contradicts Gotthard ´s theory of girls not being interested in these games, because they are not attracted to guys who love fantasy. Gotthard claims that: “These boys are weird, not-that-handsome-at-all outsiders, who talk about things girls, are not interested in.” She paints a picture of an ideal date by Gotthard, a date where the two people would sit together in the park and watch the stars. “His nickname is professor; I think he likes to philosophize a lot,” adds Pelcová.
“I think I can make a living out of writing. Even now, when I earn some money from the scripts written for TV, it is not a poor industry as my parents would earlier say,” Gotthard defends his future dream. His parents support every step that Gotthard makes, even though they still feel a bit uncertain about his future occupancy.
According to them, it is not as secure and exact an occupancy as the technical engineering could be. Gotthard responds: “One can succeed, if one does his work precisely. Even such a work that needs a big use of fantasy can be done with a great perfection and it can even become a routine.”
In the future, he thinks that he will work either in a movie or television production team. He still wants to continue with the scriptwriting for the LARP community, because people get more interested in these activities lately. What he really appreciates is their satisfaction after a good role play.

Producing art and entertainment for people is Gotthard ´s aim. Art that is not associated with the ostentatious life of controversial artists, but art that would be systematically done for a purpose and a living. “Everything can be used for a purpose, even your imagination.”