Because every
story begins
with words

video four successful first time script writers

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

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

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

M. K. Simmons

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

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

Thomas Jefferson

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

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

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.

William C. Gault

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

Dan Poynter

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

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.

John Irving

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

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.

Douglas Adams

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

Thomas Wolfe

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

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray