Screen Writer Quotes

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

When a writer looked at an empty computer screen, what did she see? Tristan wondered. A movie screen ready to be lit with faces? A night sky with one small star blinking at the top, a universe ready to be written on? Endless possibilities. Love's endless twists and turns - and all love's impossibilities.

So you want to be a writer if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don’t do it. if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it, don’t do it. if you’re trying to write like somebody else, forget about it. if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you’re not ready. don’t be like so many writers, don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don’t be dull and boring and pretentious, don’t be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don’t add to that. don’t do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes. Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange. Some, downright weird. But then again, you’d have to be. To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors.

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it ... To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it--everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not interactive with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

Your mind is the projection screen every writer steals; it is the firing of your neurones that makes every book come alive. You are the electricity that turns it on. A book cannot live until the touch of your hand on the first page brings it alive. A writer is essentially typing blank pages – shouting out spells in the dark – until the words are read by you, and the magic explodes into your head, and no one else's.

If every minute of time elapsed on the screen equals in length of time every other minute, and obviously it does, and if time on the screen equals importance to the audience, that is, one minute of screen time gives equal weight to the emotional, dramatic, narrative, and every other aspect of experiencing a movie as every other minute, and it does, then we know something important we need to know about screenplays.

Most humans were not malicious, only drastically misguided and desperate in their loneliness. They learned at some point that there was an eccentric core to their personality and that it was possible no one else shared their own brand of eccentricity. They put up screens around that core to shield from embarrassment and shame. For all the pompous forms in which writers and musicians have described it, love was surely that moment when the screens might come down in front of another human, if only for a moment, and freely give them a long, unfettered look into the true middle where the fear and anguish lives.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

As a writer you slant all evidence in favor of the conclusions you want to produce and you rarely tilt in favor of the truth. ...This is what a writer does: his life is a maelstrom of lying. Embellishment is his focal point. This is what we do to please others. This is what we do in order to flee ourselves. A writer's physical life is basically one of stasis, and to combat this constraint, an opposite world and another self have to be constructed daily. ...the half world of a writer's life encourages pain and drama, and defeat is good for art: if it was day we made it night, if it was love we made it hate, serenity becomes chaos, kindness became viciousness, God became the devil, a daugher became a whore. I had been inordinately rewarded for participating in this process, and lying often leaked from my writing life--an enclosed sphere of consciousness, a place suspended outside of time, where the untruths flowed onto the whiteness of a blank screen--into the part of me that was tactile and alive.

Unfortunately, many people suffer from BPS - Blank Page Syndrome. Let's face it: starting to write is scary. Seeing the cursor blinking at you on that bright white screen, realizing that you now have to come up with three or ten or twenty pages of text all on your own - it's enough to give anyone a major case of writer's block!

But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy?

SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don't do it. if you're doing it for money or fame, don't do it. if you're doing it because you want women in your bed, don't do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don't do it. if it's hard work just thinking about doing it, don't do it. if you're trying to write like somebody else, forget about it. if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you're not ready. don't be like so many writers, don't be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don't be dull and boring and pretentious, don't be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don't add to that. don't do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

Writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. And now, when I finish a long day of CNN-related fear and loathing mixed with eyeballing my own resolutely white screen, I do not crawl into bed with 500-page comic novels about “multicultural” London. I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.

Why I am Passionate and Dedicated 1000% to producing and bringing my books Loving Summer, Bitter Frost, and other book series to the Screen is because these are the very books that I was cyber-bullied on. When confronted by bullies, you don't shy away, but you Fight Back. Many people have not read the books, but believe fake news and damaging slanders against them and me as a person because it was a marketing strategy used to sell my books' rival books. By bringing these very books to the screen, people can see how different my books are to theirs. Also, most of all, it is pretty darn fun and fierce for me, as a female Asian writer, director, and producer to bring these fan favorite books to screen.

I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone!

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

My life had been like a painter who climbs up a road overhanging a lake that is hidden from view by a screen of rocks and trees. Through a gap he glimpses it, he has it all there in front of him, he takes up his brushes.

I don’t think most people realize—and there’s no reason they should—the amount of demeaning garbage you have to take if you want a career in the arts. I mean, going off to med school is something you can say with your head high. Or being a banker or going into insurance or the family business—no problem. But the conversations I had with grown-ups after college… “So you’re done with school now, Bill.” “That’s right.” “So what’s next on the agenda?” Pause. Finally I would say it: “I want to be a writer.” And then they would pause. “A writer.” “I’d like to try.” Third and final pause. And then one of two inevitable replies: either “What are you going to do next?” or “What are you really going to do?” That dread double litany… What are you going to do next?… What are you really going to do?… What are you going to do next?… What are you really going to do…?

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.

It was getting harder, however. American magazines still looked shiny and lively, but by the early 1960s, writers like Flora were sensing trouble. With television's exploding popularity, more and more people were staring at screens instead of turning pages. Big corporations like car manufacturers were pulling their advertising dollars out of print and spending them on the airwaves. Magazines were bleeding ad pages and readers, and editors scrambled to balance budgets by retooling audiences.

I'm not sure if people understand what it means to be a writer. It's not like it feels so great. I mean, most of the time you are sitting at your desk and bleeding out onto your computer screen, your notepad, your notebook... there's a lot of bleeding that goes on when you're a writer! You don't just work to sell books, you work to bind your wounds and put your skin back together again after opening yourself up all over the place! I don't know how other writers write... but this is how I write.

I don’t get writer's block because I don’t believe in it. I believe you sit in front of the computer and force your fingers to get something on the screen.

Just a word is friend, yet when seen on a screen will bring a beaming smile to the writer and receiver of the word.... Friend.

I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.

As a footnote to the above, I would like to say that I am getting very tired of literary authorities, on both the stage and the screen, who advise young writers to deal only with those subjects that happen to be familiar to them personally. It is quite true that this theory probably produced "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," but the chances are it would have ruled out "Hamlet.

Midnight ... Stare at screen. Vaguely aware right hand has hit keys to open new file. Start breathing very slowly. Write 1,943 words. Bed. For a day there, thought we weren't going to make it.

You know what writing is? Writing is sitting on a chair staring into space. Writing is two hours surfing the internet and five minutes typing. Writing is skim-reading ‘writing advice’ on websites and muttering ‘fuck off’ under your breath. Writing is looking at your friends’ success and muttering ‘fuck off’ under your breath. Writing is reading over what you’ve written and thinking you’re a genius. Writing is reading over what you’ve written and shouting ‘fuck you’ at the screen. Writing is £3500 college courses after which you pursue a career in telemarketing. Writing is something you either fucking do or you fucking don’t. Writing is listening to Tom Waits and wanting to be the literary equivalent. Writing is ending up as the literary equivalent of Bananarama. Writing is forty publishers saying you do not meet our needs at this time. Writing is meeting no one’s needs at any time. Writing is completing 2000 words one morning and weeping about never being able to write again the next. Writing is losing a whole day’s work to a decrepit Dell laptop. Writing is never having the time to write and never writing when you have the time. Writing is having one idea and coasting on that for months until another one comes along. Writing is never having any ideas. Writing is sitting at a bus stop and having four million ideas and not having a notebook to hand. Writing is laughing at the sort of people who keep notebooks on them at all times as if they are proper writers. Writing is reading. Writing is reading. Writing is reading. Writin’ is fightin’. Writing is writing.

Ronald Rolheiser, my undisputed favorite Catholic writer of all time, with hurricane force: Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever…. We, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church. Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

After my shower, I stepped on my bathroom scale and no numbers appeared on the screen. Either I weigh nothing at all, or the scale needs a new battery. I wonder how I got down to zero, and could I teach this anti-obesity at $19.95 per book?

Being lately engaged to plead a cause before the Court of the Hundred, the crowd was so great that I could not get to my place without crossing the tribunal where the judges sat. And I have this pleasing circumstance to add further, that a young nobleman, having had his tunic torn, an ordinary occurrence in a crowd, stood with his gown thrown over him, to hear me, and that during the seven hours I was speaking, whilst my success more than counterbalanced the fatigue of so long a speech. So let us set to and not screen our own indolence under pretence of that of the public. Never, be very sure of that, will there be wanting hearers and readers, so long as we can only supply them with speakers and writers worth their attention.

Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui.

Their conversation ceased abruptly with the entry of an oddly-shaped man whose body resembled a certain vegetable. He was a thickset fellow with calloused and jaundiced skin and a patch of brown hair, a frizzy upheaval. We will call him Bell Pepper. Bell Pepper sidled up beside The Drippy Man and looked at the grilled cheese in his hand. The Drippy Man, a bit uncomfortable at the heaviness of the gaze, politely apologized and asked Bell Pepper if he would like one. “Why is one of your legs fatter than the other?” asked Bell Pepper. The Drippy Man realized Bell Pepper was not looking at his sandwich but towards the inconsistency of his leg sizes. “You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. “Just curious. Never seen anything like it before.” “I was raised not to feel shame and hide my legs in baggy pants.” “So you flaunt your deformity by wearing short shorts?” “Like you flaunt your pockmarks by not wearing a mask?” Bell Pepper backed away, kicking wide the screen door, making an exit to a porch over hanging a dune of sand that curved into a jagged upward jab of rock. “He is quite sensitive,” commented The Dry Advisor. “Who is he?” “A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.

Eventually Frances was credited with writing 325 scripts covering every conceivable genre. She also directed and produced half a dozen films, was the first Allied woman to cross the Rhine in World War I, and served as the vice president and only woman on the first board of directors of the Screen Writers Guild. She painted, sculpted, spoke several languages fluently, and played “concert caliber” piano. Yet she claimed writing was “the refuge of the shy” and she shunned publicity; she was uncomfortable as a heroine, but she refused to be a victim.

I fear the day when the technos decide that paper books are obsolete and we are reading from PC screens and iPods and eBooks, and we never again experience the little rush of opening a new book and cracking the spine and smelling the print and diving deep into the thoughts of the writer.

so you want to be a writer? if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don’t do it. if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it, don’t do it. if you’re trying to write like somebody else, forget about it. if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you’re not ready. don’t be like so many writers, don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don’t be dull and boring and pretentious, don’t be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don’t add to that. don’t do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

Lately, I usually write at the desk in my living-room or bedroom. From time to time, our red and stripy cat named Foxy decides to be my companion, poking his curious caramel-colored nose to the screen, watching me typing, and making attempts to put his paws on the keyboard despite the fact that he knows he is not allowed to; he also loves to arrange “sunbathing sessions for himself, purring joyfully while lying with his belly up under the lamp placed to the left of my computer; and, of course, the cat can’t wait for when I happen to have a snack, to beg for some treats that seem to him tastiest if eaten from a caring human’s hand.

I liked the ending of The Sopranos. The screen suddenly went black. In the middle of a scene. Without any of the plotlines being resolved. That's what real life is like. Everything keeps going, until someone turns off the lights and you're dead. And even then the story continues, without you. There is no such thing as a happy ending.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. If you’re trying a screenplay, you know it’s never going to be Bergman. If it’s a novel, well, what kind of a novelist can you hope to be when Dostoevski was there before you. And Dickens and Cervantes and all the other masters that led you to the prison of your desk. But if you’re a writer, that’s what you must do, and in order to accomplish anything at all, at the rock bottom of it all is your confidence. You tell yourself lies and you force them into belief: Hey, you suckers, I’m going to do it this one time. I’m going to tell you things you never knew. I’ve—got—secrets!

Alertness is a requirement of the writing life, staying nimble on your feet, open to the stories that will rise up and flower around you while you are walking your dog on the beach or taking the kids to soccer practice. The great stories often make their approach with misdirection, camouflage, or smoke screens to hide their passage through your life.

Ava was blessed with amazing beauty but was academically challenged. Angelina tried to give her a quick introduction to computers but was horrified at Ava’s lack of knowledge and complete failure to understand. Ava called the CD drawer the cup holder and honestly thought it was her holding her coffee or drink when typing. She thought the monitor was the telly and the mouse was the roller. She kept exiting programmes instead of closing documents and kept deleting items and forgetting to save things. Things happened Angelina’s computers that never happened before: programs failed to respond and the computer kept crashing. She typed e-mails and then printed them and put them in an envelope to post them, Angelina was speechless. She even killed a machine by constant abuse for the week. It just died the screen went blank and a message came up of fundamental hard drive failure, the monitor went black and the keyboard and mouse went dead and could not be restored. It went to the computer scrap yard, RIP. Angelina ran her out of the IT dept in their firm terrified she’d cause any more mayhem. She was the absolute blonde bombshell when it came to computers

writers, people you didn’t even have to say hello to—and still be horribly murdered for your trouble. Once-overs you’d found ways to ignore now had you looking for the particular highlight off some creep’s eyes that would send you behind double and triple locks to a room lit only by the TV screen, and whatever was in the fridge to last you till you felt together enough to step outside again.

The internet liquefied physical borders faster than they were already doing on their own. For all that, there are only regional writers. There are no "internet writers," like there used to be "paperback writers." Every tweet comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" goes into the "somewhere" where you're reading it in. You read Nietzsche in the Ozarks for a while, let's say, then you get up and sweep the leaves from your porch for a longer while. Place wins on time spent every time, unless you're demented enough to put out your eyes on screens longer than you sweep. We are in a state of "transitional regionalism," a place where regions are instantly transmitted to other regions, but they don't universalize them, they only make them more provincial, by framing them with the local.

voracious reader, and it dawned on her that a corporate job in Tampa or Jacksonville was not, in fact, the be-all and end-all. Something lay beyond that point. Florence had haunted the library, desperate for glimpses of lives unlike her own. She had a penchant for stories about glamorous, doomed women like Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer. Soon, however, her fascination shifted from the women in the stories to the women who wrote them. She devoured the diaries of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, who were far more glamorous and doomed than any of their characters. But without a doubt, Florence’s Bible was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Admittedly, she spent more time scrolling through photos of Joan Didion in her sunglasses and Corvette Stingray than actually reading her, but the lesson stuck. All she had to do was become a writer, and her alienation would magically transform into evidence of brilliance rather than a source of shame. When she looked into the future, she saw herself at a beautiful desk next to a window, typing her next great book. She could never quite see the words on the screen, but she knew they were brilliant and would prove once and for all that she was special. Everyone would know the name Florence Darrow. And who’d trade that for a condo?

Great characters- They are pivotal for a great plot. THEN a solid plot: Why then? If you do not have great characters it is impossible to create a good plot, nonetheless a solid one. Once you have built great characters for the scenes, there you have it. It’s just like the movies, you cannot have a great film if the characters are frail and their lines are weak as well. I guess great world-building comes along with a good plot. If there is something that will work fine in a novel is how you will develop from the theme. You’ve got to establish a good timeline, and from there it comes a world. You see the technical matters don’t match or matter as much to me. Even a poorly written story, if there is a good plot and great characters on it will make a divine combination There are simply many cases of it over the mainstream and that even reached the big screen.

Nya sought to explain. “He was to ensorcell my computer back to functionality. Even in the Maelstrom, we did not have the blue screen of death. Was his job not information technology? Was his task not to fix such issues so I could return to selling paper, as is my task?” “But, madness and pain beyond comprehension?” Bob did not meet Nya’s eyes. “NOT EVEN THE CHAOS LORDS OF THE MAELSTROM USE MICROSOFT WORD. WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS PLACE?

There are also generational knowledges in play, accessed and skilled within a history of televisual experiments in educational entertainment. For US academics schooled in the fifties, sixties, and seventies some old TV shows haunt this vignette as well. Two are Walter Cronkite’s You Are There (CBS, 1953–57) and Steve Allen’s Meeting of Minds (PBS, 1977–81). During the mid-century decades either or both could be found on the TV screen and in US secondary school classrooms. Even now the thoughtfully presentist You are There reenactments can be viewed on DVDs from Netflix; you can be personally addressed and included as Cronkite interviews Socrates about his choice to poison himself with hemlock rather than submit to exile after ostracism in ancient Athens. Cronkite’s interviews, scripted by blacklisted Hollywood writers, were specifically charged with messages against McCarthy-style witch hunts that were “felt” rather than spoken out.

All of us are writers reading other people's writing, turning pages or clicking to the next screen with pleasure and admiration. All of us absorb other people's words, feeling like we have gotten to know the authors personally in our own ways, even if just a tiny bit. True, we may also harbor jealousy or resentment, disbelief or disappointment. We may wish we had written those words ourselves or berate ourselves for knowing we never could or sigh with relief that we didn't, but thank goodness someone else has.

That yes you commit to as reader and writer is the current that hums through all the work. Of course, you might say yes and then come up against an iceberg. No, you suddenly say definitively. And there you are. What do you do next? I can’t answer that for you, but I do know you eventually have to do something—or freeze to death. See if you can chip away at even a little of the mass in front of you—or try standing up on it. Does it support you? In a weeklong cold winter workshop in Taos I read aloud this passage from Richard Nelson’s The Island Within: The first section of road follows the bay’s edge, behind a strip of tall, leafless alders. When we’re about halfway around, a bald eagle in dark, youthful plumage sails down to a fish carcass on the beach just ahead. He seems careless or unafraid—quite different from the timid, sharp-eyed elders—so I leash Shungnak to the bike, drop my pack, and try to sneak in for a closer look. Using a driftwood pile as a screen, I stalk within fifty feet of the bird, but he spots me peering out between the logs.

I once told a very serious writer/poet I knew about how obsessed I was with various women’s lives. I think I was talking about Vivien Leigh at the time, as I was working on a book dealing with former screen legends, that I have since abandoned. Or perhaps the mad wives. I don’t know. This poet was very serious, very pure. Derrida in the AM. Pronouncing his name correctly. That sort of thing. She fixed me with some look - this was maybe 7 years ago - and said - more than a bit dismissingly - oh, you’re very interested with lives. Or maybe she said: Oh, you’re very interested in these women’s lives. And I said, yes, I guess I am. I remember feeling guilty—like this wasn’t a writerly thing to be interested in, the subject of others’ lives. That this was gossip. That being unliterary, somehow. This devouringness. I have since realized that most of the works I’m interested in, are about absolute obsession with other people’s lives, often real-people’s lives, and these works become unserious biographies, avant-garde acts of gossip, while still working within the structure of the novel.

In 2003, a Dutch clinical psychologist named Christof van Nimwegen began a fascinating study of computer-aided learning that a BBC writer would later call “one of the most interesting examinations of current computer use and the potential downsides of our increasing reliance on screen-based interaction with information systems.”26 Van Nimwegen had two groups of volunteers work through a tricky logic puzzle on a computer. The puzzle involved transferring colored balls between two boxes in accordance with a set of rules governing which balls could be moved at which time. One of the groups used software that had been designed to be as helpful as possible. It offered on-screen assistance during the course of solving the puzzle, providing visual cues, for instance, to highlight permitted moves. The other group used a bare-bones program, which provided no hints or other guidance. In the early stages of solving the puzzle, the group using the helpful software made correct moves more quickly than the other group, as would be expected. But as the test proceeded, the proficiency of the members of the group using the bare-bones software increased more rapidly. In the end, those using the unhelpful program were able to solve the puzzle more quickly and with fewer wrong moves. They also reached fewer impasses—states in which no further moves were possible—than did the people using the helpful software. The findings indicated, as van Nimwegen reported, that those using the unhelpful software were better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tended to rely on simple trial and error. Often, in fact, those with the helpful software were found “to aimlessly click around” as they tried to crack the puzzle.

Writer's Rhyme Word by word line by line, I'm gonna make this writing fine. I'll reread 'til I know that each sentence says it so. Check the grammar and the meaning; be the critic; do the screening. Dictionary's not for show; Helps me get those words to flow. Watch the diet; hem it in. Do not fear to make it thin. Simple is a goal to praise; Let's untie that wordy phrase. Every word let's be sure follows the last with meaning pure. "Won't be easy," so 'tis said, but effort will put me ahead. Word by word line by line, I'm gonnna make this writing fine, even though it takes some time, I'm gonna make this writing fine; I'm gonna make this writing fine.

Lucy gripped her chilled glass of orange and raspberry juice. When Rebecca talked about Austen, she’d mostly mentioned Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley. She hadn’t really thought of the doe-eyed, pale-skinned heroines. On the screen, Anne Elliot walked down a long hallway, glancing just once at covered paintings, her mouth a grim line. Lucy thought Jane Austen would start the story with the romance, or the loss of it, but instead the tale seemed to begin with Anne’s home, and having to make difficult decisions. Maybe this writer from over two hundred years ago knew how everything important met at the intersection of family, home, love, and loss. This was something Lucy understood with every fiber of her being.

I'm trying to stitch these scenes from a life together, I am trying to master the art of cinematic collage, but I find the material has become amorphous. I can no longer tell what is true apart from what I want to be tru anymore. It's like a movie I watched when I was high. The images shimmer somewhere in the mirky depths, I know I have watched this film before, but I can't pull up anything I would trust as real, true detail, because everything has been embellished by these years of grief, guilt and remorse. The celluloid has tarnished, it wasn't ever deemed to be worth much, it wasn't stored properly, so now the writer can't even decipher the director's name on the film can. I can no longer separate what happened on screen from the stoner wisecracks I made whilst watching it.

Imaginary Lives Imaginary Lives is a thought experiment I have adapted from two important career-change thinkers, Julia Cameron and John Williams, which aims to take your ideas a stage closer towards specific job options.55 It’s simple but potentially powerful. • Imagine five parallel universes, in each of which you could have a whole year off to pursue absolutely any career you desired. Now think of five different jobs you might want to try out in each of these universes. Be bold in your thinking, have fun with your ideas and your multiple selves. Your five choices might be food photographer, member of parliament, tai chi instructor, social entrepreneur running a youth education project, and wide-achieving Renaissance generalist. One person I know who did this activity – a documentary film maker who was having doubts about her career – listed massage therapist, sculptor, cellist, screen-play writer, and owner of her own bar on a tiny, old-fashioned Canarian island. Now come back down to earth and look hard at your five choices. Write down what it is about them that attracts you. Then look at them again, and think about this question: • How does each career measure up against the two motivations in the previous activity that you chose to prioritize in the future? If you decided, for instance, that you want a combination of making a difference and high status, check whether your five imaginary careers might provide them. The point is to help you think more deeply about exactly what you are looking for in a career, the kind of experiences that you truly desire.

But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness -- not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it -- everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are: reading is actual collaborating with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

I saw a guy the other day at a wedding, and I told him my theory on why we’ve seen this explosion in comedies in the past fifteen years. Number one, America is tacking hard to the right. That sort of extremism always kind of kicks up the need to create comedy. But the second thing is Avid. What’s Avid? It’s a digital movie-editing program that directors use, and it’s incredibly helpful. I think Avid is hugely responsible for this boom in comedy. In the past, one would have to shoot the film and edit it, which was a big deal. Now, filmmakers can record the laughs from a test audience at a screening, and we can then cut to the rhythm of those laughs, the rhythm of the audience. We synchronize the laughs with the film. We can really get our timing down to a hundredth of a second. You can decide where you want your story to kick in, where you want a little bit of mood, where you want a hard laugh line. All of this can really be calibrated to these test screenings that we do. It doesn’t mean that it becomes mathematical. It still ultimately means that you have to make creative choices, but you can just really get a lot out of it. Sort of like surgery with a laser compared with a regular scalpel. We’re able to download a movie onto the computer and literally do all our edits in minutes. The precision is incredible. You play back the audio of the test screening and get everything timed just right. Like, “This laugh is losing this next line; let’s split the difference here.” You’re able to achieve this rolling energy. You can try experimental edits, and do multiple test screenings, and it’s all because you can move so fast with this program. Comedy is the one genre that I think has just really benefited from this more than any other.

Bess Meredyth, Anita Loos and I were asked our advice on virtually every script MGM produced in the thirties,” Frances said with some resentment because she not only felt that their efforts were unappreciated, they were forced to conceal their influence and power. They were careful to always carry the scripts in “unmarked plain covers” because they were painfully aware of the whispers about “the tyranny of the woman writer.” Along with women like Kate Corbaley and Ida Koverman, Frances had “fed the machine” that the studio had become. They brought in talent before others discovered it and found stories in places others didn’t look. Adding to her frustration was her calculation that while only half of the stories she had worked on appeared on screen with her name on them, most men would demand screen credit “no matter how small their contribution to the final script.

Her disillusionment with the business had intensified as the need to simplify her stories increased. Her original treatments for Blondie of the Follies and The Prizefighter and the Lady had much more complexity and many more characters than ever made it to the screen, and adapting The Good Earth had served as a nagging reminder of the inherent restraints of film. Frances found herself inspired by memories of Jack London, sitting on the veranda with her father as they extolled the virtues of drinking their liquor “neat,” and remembered his telling her that he went traveling to experience adventure, but “then come back to an unrelated environment and write. I seek one of nature’s hideouts, like this isolated Valley, then I see more clearly the scenes that are the most vivid in my memory.” So she arrived in Napa with the idea of writing the novel she started in her hospital bed with the backdrop of “the chaos, confusion, excitement and daily tidal changes” of the studios, but as she sat on the veranda at Aetna Springs, she knew she was still too close to her mixed feelings about the film business.48 As she walked the trails and passed the schoolhouse that had served the community for sixty years, she talked to the people who had lived there in seclusion for several generations and found their stories “similar to case histories recorded by Freud or Jung.” She concentrated on the women she saw carrying the burden in this community and all others and gave them a depth of emotion and detail. Her series of short stories was published under the title Valley People and critics praised it as a “heartbreak book” that would “never do for screen material.” It won the public plaudits of Dorothy Parker, Rupert Hughes, Joseph Hergesheimer, and other popular writers and Frances proudly viewed Valley People as “an honest book with no punches pulled” and “a tribute to my suffering sex.

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself. In

Cassidy had been created by Clarence Mulford, writer of formula western novels and pulpy short stories. In the stories, Cassidy was a snorting, drinking, chewing relic of the Old West. Harry Sherman changed all that when he bought the character for the movies. Sherman hired Boyd, a veteran of the silent screen whose star had faded, to play a badman in the original film. But Boyd seemed more heroic, and Sherman switched the parts before the filming began. As Cassidy, Boyd became a knight of the range, a man of morals who helped ladies cross the street but never stooped to kiss the heroine. He was literally black and white, his silver hair a vivid contrast to his black getup. He did not smoke, believed absolutely in justice, honor, and fair play, and refused to touch liquor. Boyd’s personal life was not so noble. Born in Ohio in 1898, he had arrived in Hollywood for the first golden age, working with Cecil B. DeMille in a succession of early silents. By the mid-1920s he was a major star. Wine, women, and money were his: he drank and gambled, owned estates, married five times. But it all ended when another actor named William Boyd was arrested for possession of whiskey and gambling equipment.

But interviews with [Margaret Dumont] reveal her to have been a perceptive and talented comic actress. “Many a comedian’s lines have been lost on the screen because the laughter overlapped,” she said in the 1940s. “Script writers build up to a laugh, but they don’t allow any pause for it. That’s where I come in. I ad lib—it doesn’t matter what I say—just to kill a few seconds so you can enjoy the gag. I have to sense when the big laughs will come and fill in, or the audience will drown out the next gag with its own laughter.” A much harder job, it must be stressed, onscreen than onstage. Margaret Dumont objected to the term “stooge,” with her usual dignity. “I’m a straight lady,” she insisted, “the best straight woman in Hollywood. There’s an art to playing straight. You must build up your man, but never top him, never steal the laughs from him.” She showed great insight into the Marx Brothers’ brand of humor: “The comedy method which [they] employ is carefully worked out and concrete. They never laugh during a story conference. Like most other expert comedians, they involve themselves so seriously in the study of how jokes can be converted to their own style that they don’t ever titter while approaching their material.

A scene will not be vivid if the writer gives too few details to stir and guide the reader's imagination; neither will it be vivid if the language the writer uses is abstract instead of concrete. If the writer says "creatures" instead of "snakes," if in an attempt to impress us with fancy talk he uses Latinate terms like "hostile maneuvers" instead of sharp Anglo-Saxon words like "thrash," "coil," "spit," "hiss," and "writhe," if instead of the desert's sand and rocks he speaks of the snakes' "inhospitable abode," the reader will hardly know what picture to conjure up on his mental screen. These two faults, insufficient detail and abstraction where what is needed is concrete detail, are common, in fact all but universal, in amateur writing. Another is the failure to run straight at the image; that is, the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: "Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks." Compare: "She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting." The phrase "two snakes were fighting" is more abstract than, say, "two snakes whipped and lashed, striking at each other." ...Generally speaking, though no laws are absolute in fiction, vividness urges that almost every occurrence of of such phrases as "she noticed" and "she saw" be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

An article in the New York Times concluded that, “Television will never be a serious competitor for radio.” If you’re listening to the radio, you can get on and do other things. To experience television, the Times argued, “People must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen.” Ironically, of course, this was to become the very attraction of the whole system. Nonetheless, it seemed clear to the writer that, “The average American family doesn’t have time for it.” Well, they found time. On average, the average American family went on to squeeze about 25 hours a week from their busy schedules to sit and keep their eyes glued on the television. The fault line in the Times’ assessment of television was to judge it in terms of contemporary cultural values where there seemed to be no place for it. In fact, television was not squeezed into existing American culture: it changed the culture forever. After the arrival of television, the world was never the same place again. Television proved to be a transformative technology, just as print, the steam engine, electricity, the motorcar and others before it had been.

rickcarufel Monday, September 23, 2013 This is more like death throes than growing pains. When all is said and done Goodreads is nothing more than a glorified forum. Like other forums when the trolls are allowed to rule the roost they fail and close. All the complaints blaming authors is a smoke screen for the stalker trolls who don’t even know what a book review is. They think a book review is a weapon to be used against writers destroy their reputations, careers, livelihood and dreams. They are reacting in a frenzied exodus at the thought they will have be limited to using book reviews to review book and not to destroy writers. The goodreads site has been dominated by a stalker troll gang and is in ruins. Add to that the fact the API they sell is a total fraud. The trolls are going through goodreads and leaving hundreds if not thousands of 1-star ratings because they are angry they will no longer be allowed to use reviews for personal attacks on authors. Aside from the 1-star, no-read attack reviews from the trolls they also have a list of top reviewers posted on the site. The top six reviewers are posting over 1200 reviews a week. That means each of these people are reading and reviewing almost 30 books a day. How is that even possible? As a result they are under investigation for fraud by the FTC. I know that many complaints about the fraudulent API have been filed. So Goodreads is not growing it is dying, going the route of myspace and other social media sites that failed due to troll infestations that were allowed to get out of hand.

It requires writers to do two things that by their metabolism are impossible. They must relax, and they must have confidence. Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being examined for a hernia, and as for confidence, see how stiffly he sits, glaring at the screen that awaits his words. See how often he gets up to look for something to eat or drink. A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing. I can testify from my newspaper days that the number of trips to the water cooler per reporter-hour far exceeds the body’s need for fluids.

In his terrific book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman wrote that the best approach to a good scene is to leave out the beginning and the end (the parts readers can readily guess or that matter least)

The more of those little light bulbs that can turn on the better. Eventually you’ll have enough to light up a movie screen.

One of Walter’s favorite directors was David Butler, who directed him in Kentucky and again in a Bob Hope vehicle, The Princess and the Pirate (November 17, 1944). Butler and Brennan became close friends, and sometime after Brennan won his first Oscar they considered working on a project that would bring Brennan’s own story to the screen. Darryl Zanuck was reported to have assigned a team of writers to do just that, but there seems to be no record of what happened next, except for a newspaper article announcing that Butler and Brennan had decided to turn the autobiography into a stage play, to be titled “The Old Character.” Brennan would play himself, “returning to the footlights for the first time since he put away his makeup box in 1918 after two years in France in the 26th Division.” What became of this project is also a mystery, although Mike Brennan says, “I think that stage play kind of soured him. He liked it, but things had gone too far in the movie business. He didn’t care about it.” The story, so to speak, had been worn out, Mike thought.

In most electronic games or shows, there is a specific path the writers want a child to follow and a set outcome for the story being told.

No one knows why we do it and when we've done it rarely does anyone want it. Yet still we do it. That's what being a writer is.

I’m responsible for the whole, flattened film that has become my life. I think of camera angles. I think of how I should preserve the intricacies of the set. I must manage to capture what it means for a once-nomad to be confined to the four walls of a house. I must figure out a way to show on screen how even a small space of confinement begins to grow in the mind of the woman who inhabits it with her sorrows, how the walk from the bedroom to the door of the house becomes a Herculean task, or how the thought of checking on the slow-cooking chicken Chettinad curry when she is busy reading a book becomes an impossible chore. I also have to find out the technique to show its exact opposite, how the rooms begin to close in on this woman when she is being violated, how the walls chase her into corners, how the house appears to shrink the minute her husband is home, how there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to evade his presence.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. —Simon Newcomb (1906) The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine. —Sir Ernest Rutherford (1933) Inside was a large, shadowy hall, in which bulked a row of tall, square blocks of apparatus. They were, obviously, televisor instruments. Each had a square screen, a microphone grating, and beneath that a panel of control switches, pointer dials, and other less identifiable instruments. Kenniston found and opened a service panel in the back of one. Brief examination of the tangled apparatus inside discouraged him badly. “They were televisor communication instruments, yes. But the principles on which they worked are baffling. They didn’t even use vacuum tubes—they’d apparently got beyond the vacuum tube.” —Edmond Hamilton, The City at World’s End (1951)

You can’t make assumptions about people. On-screen, I get to control the ending. Real life is so much more disappointing.” Heddy tugged a shrimp off a skewer. “Maybe that’s why I want to be a writer. Then things can only be as bad as I make them.

I want to talk about language, form, and changing the world. The question that faces billions of people at this moment, one decade shy of the twenty-first century, is: Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? The persistent concern of engaged artists, of cultural workers, in this country and certainly within my community, is, What role can, should, or must the film practitioner, for example, play in producing a desirable vision of the future? And the challenge that the cultural worker faces, myself for example, as a writer and as a media activist, is that the tools of my trade are colonized. The creative imagination has been colonized. The global screen has been colonized. And the audience—readers and viewers—is in bondage to an industry. It has the money, the will, the muscle, and the propaganda machine oiled up to keep us all locked up in a delusional system—as to even what America is. We are taught to believe, for example, that there is an American literature, that there is an American cinema, that there is an American reality. There is no American literature; there are American literatures.

Writers often find themselves staring at the page or screen with the awful feeling that it sounds “all wrong.” For whom am I writing? is the question that can help determine the appropriateness of your tone of voice.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.

The biggest thing for aspiring writers I would say is that writing is hard work. You can’t sustain the fantasy that it should somehow be otherwise for you because you are more special or more committed than other aspiring writers. You aren’t sitting down to be entertained by the gods or to entertain yourself. At times it can be a thrill and it feels more like play, but we are easily deceived by whatever pleasures or rewards writing can offer. Exhilarating work is still work. Is it work, or is it play? And the answer is “yes.” Does it sometimes feel like it comes easily or naturally? Yes. But did it really come easily? No. Writing doesn’t offer the rhythmic endorphin hit you get scrolling down the screen clicking on memes. Are you up for the work it is going to take to become successful as a writer? It is going to be harder than you think. You are submitting to forces and to a process that you can’t fully control. There is maybe a tiny bit more control if you self-publish, and there is no shame in doing that, but even that is going to introduce hard work. Probably harder than you think. If my next novel can’t find a home, I’m not above self-publishing it in some capacity and then moving on to the next project.

A teacher can’t teach you how to write. What a teacher can do is show a writer how not to write.

To use a sculptural metaphor, the great novel, essay, biography is imprisoned inside a block of marble and the writer must chip away with a tiny chisel until the exquisite appears

I’ll focus on two of these patents, both issued in 2018,” I said to Mark Russell’s audience. “The first is entitled, Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device. This one involves an aerospace-underwater craft of incredible speed and maneuverability. A vehicle capable of flying just as well in space, air, or water without leaving a heat signature. “Sound familiar? If you’re thinking this patent has to have come from the reverse engineering of an alien craft, you aren’t alone.” I paused for effect as I put the title pages of both patents on the screen. “The how of it all is quite interesting, taking me back to my grad school days. The invention involves the creation of a quantum vacuum around a vehicle using a dense, spinning, electromagnetic energy field. Such a quantum vacuum would repel matter that would otherwise impede the craft, greatly reducing the ship’s inertia, decreasing resistance, and leading to extreme speeds.” I smiled. “Let me read you a sentence from the actual, issued patent. I’m a science fiction writer, and even I wouldn’t have been crazy enough to write a sentence this bold. Here it is: this invention would also enable us to ‘engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level.’ “That’s in the actual patent. Really! You can find the patent and read it for yourself. All you have to do is Google its official USPTA number, which is US10144532B2.

Writing is a journey with no maps, no ending, no guides (except charlatans) and often no point. Still we do it.

New York’s attack, dubbed “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” by Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum, was the NBA’s most predictable. “Windshield wipers offer more variety than the Knicks’ offense,” mused New York magazine writer Chris Smith. For many years, their possessions often went something like this: a guard would dribble down to the wing and dump an entry pass into Ewing on the block. The center, forced to deal with the spacing of a crowded Twister mat, would turn and face the basket, deciding instantly whether he had enough time to get off a shot before a second and third defender could swarm. If he didn’t have a good look, he would kick the ball out to reset the offense, or, in what was often a victory for the defense, set up a wide-open perimeter try for a shooting-deficient teammate. “If this were football, every time [his teammates] shoot, they’d be accused of intentional grounding,” New York Post columnist Peter Vecsey wrote. Every now and then, there was a pick-and-roll mixed in, or a cross screen to shake things up. When the universe allowed, a Ewing kick-out would lead to a made jumper by one of the guards. But even when players misfired, Ewing was often there to corral the miss, then gracefully put it back for a score. If his teammates were leaving messes, the 7-footer was the Bounty paper towel cleaning up after them.

Raised on screened porches and greenhouse humidity, I know how to suck the coolness out of concrete cracks.

Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it. Writers want to belong to a place that is just beyond their reach, because if they were to reach the place they would have to do the hard work of being in it. Writers don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone, and they do not want to. They are driven by some severance and none of them understands it. Not just writers. Painters. Musicians. Artists. Art is the search for intact things in a world in which all things are broken. That paragraph was dishonest. I am going to rewrite it. Here goes. I am a lost person. I wouldn’t write books if I wasn’t lost. I wouldn’t write anything at all if I wasn’t in search of paradise, and I wouldn’t be in search of paradise if I didn’t need it; if I didn’t think I would be less lost if I were to find it. So I write to find it… but no, not that either, because I am nearing middle-age now and I know there is nothing to find. I know now that my paradise is not in a cave on a South Sea island or in the montane rainforests of Borneo where the gibbons call or in a finca in Patagonia or down the side streets of Mexico City, in a blue house with yellow doors and shutters that the sun comes through and wakes me, and orange trees. There is no paradise out there, so I write to create my paradise on paper or on this blank, flat screen, but something in me always sabotages it and turns it dark. So then I write to reorder the world so that paradise might look possible again even for a moment, for someone. I don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone. I am driven by some severance and I don’t understand it. That’s better.

He imagined a reality show host selling Los Angeles to a live audience: “Are you a surfer dude hitting the waves? You’ll fit right in. How about a hipster starting a gluten-free cookie brand or a new church? Of course. And is there a place for a young family raising small children? You bet. How about a retired couple wanting to play bingo all day? Indeed. High-powered executives? Yes! Lawyers, doctors, agents, and managers? Best place to thrive. Gym buffs, starlets, chefs, yoga teachers, students, writers, healers, misfits, trainers, nurses? Right this way, please. Are you into cosplay, improv, porn, Roller Derby, voyeurism, cemetery movie screenings, food truck drag racing, AA, relapse, rehab, open mic, plastic surgery, wine tastings, biker meetups, karaoke, clubbing, S and M, or escape rooms? Come on over!” Every race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and food preference was well represented within Los Angeles County, and this is what Oscar loved most about his city;

A writer is someone who writes every day and is unhappy if he doesn't.

if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don't do it. if you're doing it for money or fame, don't do it. if you're doing it because you want women in your bed, don't do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don't do it. if it's hard work just thinking about doing it, don't do it. if you're trying to write like somebody else, forget about it. if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you're not ready. don't be like so many writers, don't be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don't be dull and boring and pretentious, don't be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don't add to that. don't do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

Stare at the blank screen for at least an hour until it bleeds. It will bleed.

Don't let baby slip too quickly from your fingers. Hang on tight until she's ready to go. And then hang on a little longer.

This period of the internet has been labeled Web 1.0—a name that works backward from the term Web 2.0, which was coined by the writer and user-experience designer Darcy DiNucci in an article called “Fragmented Future,” published in 1999. “The Web we know now,” she wrote, “which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear….The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of texts and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” On Web 2.0, the structures would be dynamic, she predicted: instead of houses, websites would be portals, through which an ever-changing stream of activity—status updates, photos—could be displayed. What you did on the internet would become intertwined with what everyone else did, and the things other people liked would become the things that you would see. Web 2.0 platforms like Blogger and Myspace made it possible for people who had merely been taking in the sights to start generating their own personalized and constantly changing scenery. As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.

I was not a key member of the staff. It was my job to take the articles the writers faxed over and type them into the computer system—it was 1996, email was still viewed as a curious phenomenon that might blow over. Also, I had to input the crossword puzzle by looking back and forth between the paper the puzzle-crafter sent me and my computer screen, trying to remember if it went black, black, white, black, or black, white, black, black. I was in a constant state of embittered self-righteousness at the office. How had I been mistaken for a charwoman? Mayita was similarly horrified by the tumble her status had taken: As a senior at Wesleyan just a few months before, she had been the next Sally Mann. Now she alphabetized negatives all day. (When we expressed subdued versions of our outrage to our elders, their responses invariably included the phrase “paying your dues.” It was not a phrase we cared for.)

In the spring of 1935, an editor at the New York publishing house Macmillan, while on a scouting trip through the South, was introduced to Mitchell and signed her to a deal for her untitled book. Upon its release in the summer of 1936, the New York Times Book Review declared it “one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.” Priced at $3, Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster. By the end of the summer, Macmillan had sold over 500,000 copies. A few days prior to the gushing review in the Times, an almost desperate telegram originated from New York reading, “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” The sender, Kay Brown, in this missive to her boss, the movie producer David Selznick, asked to purchase the book’s movie rights before its release. But Selznick waited. On July 15, seeing its reception, Selznick bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind for $50,000. Within a year, sales of the book had exceeded one million copies. Almost immediately Selznick looked to assemble the pieces needed to turn the book into a movie. At the time, he was one of a handful of major independent producers (including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney) who had access to the resources to make films. Few others could break into a system controlled by the major studios. After producing films as an employee of major studios, including Paramount and MGM, the thirty-seven-year-old Selznick had branched out to helm his own productions. He had been a highly paid salaried employee throughout the thirties. His career included producer credits on dozens of films, but nothing as big as what he had now taken on. As the producer, Selznick needed to figure out how to take a lengthy book and translate it onto the screen. To do this, Selznick International Pictures needed to hire writers and a director, cast the characters, get the sets and the costumes designed, set a budget, put together the financing by giving investors profit-participation interests, arrange the distribution plan for theaters, and oversee the marketing to bring audiences to see the film. Selznick’s bigger problem was the projected cost.

In Art and Fear Bayles and Orland say simply that as a creative person, your job is to do the work that is your work, the creative work you and you alone are meant to do. They do not say why we have this work to do because the answer is the same as the answer to the question, “Why were we born?” and “Why do I exist?” We don’t know, we may not be able to ever know, and the question might not even be valid. Get to work. Steven Pressfield famously has said that the secret to success for a creative person is to overcome Resistance by working at your craft every day. And when you do your work every day your muse, your guardian angle, will visit you with inspiration. In short, truly creative moments are a metaphysical experience. Other inspired writers list Art Making as one of the core talents that human beings can be born with and are here in this earthly dimension to experience. Ainslie MacLeod lists ten in “The Instruction.” But I like what screen writers Sigal and Lake wrote in “Frida”: “If you're a real painter, you'll paint because you can't live without painting. You'll paint till you die.” Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera. And that is why real artists create. It is a choice between creating and dying.

Even if you know nothing about the process of filmmaking…you can sense the fear, excitement, and risk that went into a scene like that. For the writer to conceive it, for the director to facilitate it, for the actors to execute it, and for the editor to hinge it to the flow of a thousand other moments with as much gambled on them.