I first came upon this concept in the writings of Laurens van der Post, the great South African. Are you familiar with him? He wrote one of my favorite books, The Seed and the Sower. The following comes from The Lost World of the Kalahari: It has sometimes appeared to me that fever is designed, in part, to magnify reality, so that the imponderable contribution of the spirit to the malaise which produces fever, can become visible. There seems to be deep within it a rounding-up process of time which brings past, present, and future all lucidly together in the…

We were talking last week about stakes and jeopardy. It is critical in any story, I was saying, that the stakes for all characters be as high as possible—preferably life and death. There’s a further aspect to stakes/jeopardy that might be worth exploring this week. The stakes in a story should always be on-theme. Lemme digress for a minute. As I’m writing this, I’m wondering, “Is this subject of interest?” It is to me, but I’m wondering if getting into such nuts-and-bolts detail about storytelling is only tedious to readers who log onto this blog. Am I boring you with…

A few weeks back, we were talking about this tidbit of wisdom from screenwriter Jack Epps: “You can’t do everything in one draft.” The corollary, we said, is to focus on only one aspect of your manuscript/screenplay/videogame at a time. One aspect per draft. Today let’s talk about stakes. (Ideally you and I should have thought deeply about this before we even started Draft #1. But let’s be real. Most of us plunge in and swim like hell for the far shore. So maybe we need to regroup for Drafts #2 through #15 and revisit certain essentials.) What are “stakes”…

Have you seen this clip from Harlan Ellison, the screenwriter? I rank it up there with Josh Olson’s all-time great rant, “No, I Won’t Read Your F*#king Screenplay.” What Ellison says is that anytime he has done anything for “exposure,” he has totally wasted his time. I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes “opportunities” are presented to us. A chance to get our work exposed. People will see. It’ll make a difference. We’ll advance the brand. Bullshit. Almost every opportunity I’ve been exposed to (not all, be it said) is an opportunity for the promoter, not for me. I’m expendable. I’m interchangeable.…

We’ve been talking about depth of commitment for three weeks now. But one question has not yet been asked: What exactly are we committed to? Is it our art, our career, our family, our nation? Lemme take the long way around by flashing back to an earlier era in my own life. For years I was committed to nothing. I mean nothing. I suppose if you tied me to a tree and threatened to bayonet me, I would’ve tried to talk you out of it. But even that, my own life, I wasn’t particularly committed to. I was bored a…