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The coolest ghostwriting blog on the planet.

Another victim from Hawaii.

October 14, 2022June 4, 2026

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Wanted: Someone who works for free.

October 12, 2022June 4, 2026

Interesting. However, none of my writers works for free. And you don’t work for free, either. Can’t help you. Michael McKown Read More...

It’s tough being a writer. You kill several people and you lose your appetite.

August 7, 2022June 4, 2026

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Thoughts while reading a digital pile of screenplays.

August 3, 2022June 4, 2026

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If they don’t have a phone number, tell ’em to get lost.

June 10, 2022June 4, 2026

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The real-life, super immediate critical priority rush wedding toast story.

May 23, 2022June 4, 2026

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Useful advice from a successful screenwriter.

March 9, 2022June 4, 2026

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Three new wedding-related articles are now online.

February 23, 2022June 4, 2026

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The plus-size Jewish redneck lady has died: The ultimate obituary.

December 21, 2021June 4, 2026

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An angry man called me today about an apparent ghostwriting scam.

October 5, 2021June 4, 2026

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Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote Quote

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

There are three primal urges in human beings: Food, sex, and rewriting someone else’s play.

Romulus Linney

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.

C. J. Cherryh

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

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.

George Singleton

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.