Advice — expert series

There are hundreds of ways your heart can break in Hollywood. The good news is that there are hundreds of ways you can heal it as well. Here are a few to utilize when you're just starting out. Have you seen the bumper sticker that reads 'Just Say No To Hollywood'? If you can do that, hallelujah. However, if you have a dream you want to come true, if you long to create a larger life for yourself, if you have a burning Hollywood desire, you can get from aspiring to acquiring. Pennies From Heaven This might be your first...

I loved The Matrix -- loved the action, loved the situation and characters, but most of all, I loved the idea behind the film. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the 19th century poet and literary critic, who coined the concept known as 'the willing suspension of disbelief.' What he says is basically this: when we, the viewer, reader or audience, approach a work of art, we must leave our own personal beliefs, our own personal perception of reality, behind so we can approach the work on its own merits, on its own level. In other words, we must 'willingly suspend...

If you could sit down in a chair next to the editor of work by James Baldwin, Elia Kazan, Jack Higgins, Jacques Barzun, David Frost, Budd Schulberg, Dylan Thomas and Lionel Trilling, what could that editor say that would be immediately helpful to you in your work? If you're a film writer or a novelist, would there be a benefit in sitting down with the man whom Kazan in his autobiography called his producer and director. (Kazan may have been the only American to hit home runs in all three fields, film, theater and fiction. He directed five Pulitzer-prize-winning plays,...

I wrote 'The Writer's Guide to Producers, Directors and Screenwriters' Agents' somewhat by accident. I quit Hollywood in disgust after two feature screenplays were purchased, but not filmed, this after years of options and some TV work, but no feature credit. I went back to writing articles and books for a living. One day, I noticed I was about to be out of a job, so I started promoting to publishers in the Members Directory of America Online. Two weeks later, I had a signed contract to do the first Writer's Guide. I wrote the first edition for people not...

Journals have been the secret weapon for writers from Allen Ginsburg to Virginia Woolf to Victor Hugo. Make it your secret weapon, too. Skilled writers have developed their own voices -- unique ways to express themselves. They have learned to open the windows to their inner workings for insightful perspectives into themselves and the rest of their worlds. How do writers record these everyday flashes of insight and noteworthy musings that might otherwise evaporate into oblivion? A Chinese proverb states, 'The palest ink is stronger than the most miraculous memory.' Or rewritten to reflect our computer era: The palest pixels...