It has become unfashionable, almost unethical, to print hard copies of a manuscript. If you must print, print double-sided. Printing anything single-sided strikes the current generation of student writers as absurd, if not criminal. Curiously, this same generation usually has no qualms about running through three and four plastic-topped Starbuck's coffee cups, complete with sleeve, [...]
Some thoughts on how to face the daunting recriminations of the blank page: Show up. I like to think of the writer's discipline this way: "Optimizing the possibility for the happy accident of writing to occur." You've got to be there when insight or inspiration happens. One way to do that is to set aside [...]
When I was purchasing my first computer (back at the dawn of the computer age), I sought the advice of a friend's father who was thick into the then nascent computer industry. My choice of computer was an 8Mhz cpm machine desktop or an 8Mhz cpm portable (the size of a small steamer trunk). His [...]
An essay I wrote about Post-Katrina New Orleans: Gifts from Nola (first published in Bomb, Summer 2006) Share on Facebook
Eliminating the use of a single word will instantly improve your screenplay by a factor of ten. That word? Is. In day-to-day colloquial speech, we indicate an event that is happening as we speak and is likely to continue happening into the near future by using a combination of "to-be" and the -ing form of [...]
After twenty odd years teaching screenwriting and reading screenplays I think I can speak with some authority about the most common mistakes made by beginning screenwriters. Share on Facebook
Twenty five years after the release of Under the Volcano and I still get a knot in my stomach when I think about some of the dynamics involved in its making, the personal and professional mis-steps and conflicts. I was very fortunate that my screenplay for Under the Volcano met with John Huston's approval; that [...]
For my first job after Under the Volcano I was hired to adapt Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Having succeeded with an adaptation that had defeated many previous writers, I was approached to manage another near impossible adaptation: bring Twain's novel to the screen with a fresh slant, avoid the pitfalls [...]
What is Story? This simple word and complex concept is used and abused and tossed about like so much confetti without ever being looked at closely. Surely, I hear you say, story needs no definition. I know a story. I heard this story. It's a great story. What's your story? But really what do we [...]
