
Is the customer always right? Of course not. This is not 1950. Are we word slaves at the service of tyrannical bosses? Nope. If Read More...
Is the customer always right? Of course not. This is not 1950.
Are we word slaves at the service of tyrannical bosses? Nope.
If somebody calls and wants us to essentially take dictation, I’ll refer them to a typist.
If someone tells me they’ve completed their first screenplay and it’s brilliant, and all they need is a little editing and a polish, I warn them. “Stop right there. You may think it’s brilliant, but a professional screenwriter will probably think otherwise. If I send your work to one of my people, I guarantee you will hear things you don’t want to hear.”
We’re not trying to beat you up. We want you to succeed, and we know what needs to be done to achieve that. And we know if you’re new at this that you’ve made mistakes that will prevent your work from ever being filmed.
Don’t sabotage yourself.
Let’s pretend you have a basic understanding of how the mechanical innards of a car work. You take the car to a mechanic because it’s become sluggish. The mechanic will want to know the symptoms; that will help his diagnosis. But that mechanic will not appreciate being told what to do by an amateur.
If you want the job done right, trust your professional.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.
Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.
It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.
Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk — away from any open flames — to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

























