Advice — expert series

Have you ever noticed whom the actors thank when they win an Oscar? They profusely thank the director for "getting the performance out of them." They thank their agent, their husbands, wives, extended family and distant ancestors, the crew, the studio, the associate producer, and of course, their 8th grade drama teacher. In short, everyone but the writer. On those rare occasions when they do thank the writer, it's always for the words the writer gave them to speak. What they should be thanking the writer for, on a never-ending loop, is the wonderful role they got to play in...

I recently sat on a panel with four other veteran TV writer/producers at the 2007 UCLA Writer's Faire. Our panel's topic was, Writing Funny TV: The New World of Sitcoms and Spec Pilots. What is this new world of sitcoms and spec pilots? I'm not sure how well we defined our topic or even stuck to it. As comedy writers, we were too busy making jokes. But the theme that seemed to emerge from our free-wheeling discussion was that there are new and creative ways for aspiring writers to get noticed and gain a toe-hold in Hollywood that go beyond...

I was listening to a speaker talk to a group of us the other night and 45 minutes into it, I was looking for the door. The subject was the speaker's life and I have to tell ya, it wasn't grabbin' me. Incident after incident was unveiled, stories about the speaker as a teen, adult, and married man seemed to be of the had-to-be-there variety. And then, magically, he came to a story that tied it all together. It was a simple moment in which he realized what his life had meant. And I got it! Suddenly all the stories...

We are taught many things in school, but all too often, this is linear learning, textbook learning. I can remember sitting in classrooms as a child staring aimlessly out of the window at passing clouds. The teacher's verdict was I was wasting my time, yet who is to say that daydreaming is less valuable than memorizing a list of facts? Thomas Edison was a daydreamer. He pondered, "What if there could be light in a small bulb powered by electricity?" Non-creatives often forget how important unscheduled time is for a writer. This seems particularly true of those who hire writers....

I was sitting in a well-furnished office on the 20th Century Fox lot, asking James L. Brooks ("Terms of Endearment," "As Good as It Gets," "Broadcast News") about the art and craft of screenwriting. "I never knew anybody," he was saying, "who ever got a Writers Guild card who didn't have a hard time when somebody said, 'What do you do for a living?' saying, 'I'm a writer.' Your voice always catches on 'a writer,'" Brooks said. "From the earliest stages, it's what your secret thought was that you wanted to be and what of course you knew was impossible...