
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.
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.
The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
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.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.
What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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.
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.
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.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

























