Because every
story begins
with words

video four successful first time script writers

Video: Four successful first-time script writers: What they did right.

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

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

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

Thomas Wolfe

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

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

Clarence Budington Kelland

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

Jim Morrison

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

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

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

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

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

Tom Clancy

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell