Advice

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...

Often you'll hear producers, agents and others whom writers must deal with asking them for more of 'a hook' to their pitches or screenplays. What exactly a hook is, is rarely spelled out; they just know they want one. It's sort of like the problem faced by the hapless writer in Albert Brooks' 'The Muse' - everyone tells him he's 'lost his edge,' but he can't for the life of him figure out what that means. But spelled out or not, the term 'The Hook' is becoming inescapable, like 'Character Arc' or 'Plot Point' or 'High Concept,' so we've decided...

Much is made about the value of toiling for years in the Hollywood trenches before 'making it.' Those at the top call it 'paying your dues.' Baloney. Directors become directors by directing, producers by producing. They don't work their way up the food chain. There is no glory or career edge gained by laboring in obscurity while honing your craft. Hone it right out there in the limelight, and let those at the top pay for every comma splice and run-on sentence along the way. After all, you're already a damned good writer. You know it and your family and...