Blog

The coolest ghostwriting blog on the planet.

An honest email conversation about dealing with a client who wrote a problematic screenplay.

September 2, 2021June 4, 2026

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It’s time to put on my big boy pants.

August 28, 2021June 4, 2026

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We’ve begun producing our own videos!

July 31, 2021June 4, 2026

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Let’s talk about reputation and integrity.

July 27, 2021June 4, 2026

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A story about the filthiest boxing gym in New York.

April 26, 2021June 4, 2026

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Our new logo. What do you think?

April 2, 2021June 5, 2026

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The real-life word cops: Feds hoping to clarify language.

February 19, 2021June 5, 2026

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Novelists are moving into TV writers’ rooms.

February 11, 2021June 5, 2026

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There’s one wild screenplay awaiting a talented writer.

December 10, 2020June 5, 2026

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An interview with, and a new dark thriller novel by, Eric Shapiro.

October 8, 2020June 5, 2026

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I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has just put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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.

Robert McKee

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

Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.

M. K. Simmons

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

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

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

C. J. Cherryh

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

Edward Albee

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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.