
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.
Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
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.
If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.
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.
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.
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
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.
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.
























