Because every
story begins
with words

video writing for film

Exclusive ghostwriting videos!

Writing for film: A Texas waitress has us laffin’.

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

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

Jeanette Walls

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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

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.

Elbert Hubbard

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

Tom Clancy

The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.

Raymond Chandler

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.

Mark Twain

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

Neil Gaiman

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

Edward Albee

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.

Orson Scott Card

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

Thomas Wolfe

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

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

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

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

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

E. B. White

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