From time to time over the years I’ve worked with partners. The experience has taught me about the kind of writer I am, and the kind I’m not. Am I a wordsmith? Or am I a storysmith? A great partnership is a wordsmith and a storysmith. Even better is to be both yourself. What’s a wordsmith? (Another term I’d use for this is writer-writer.) A writer-writer was born with a verbal gift. She can talk. She can sling bullshit. She’s glib. She’s articulate. She can turn a phrase. If you’re a writer-writer, you’ve got an ear for dialogue. You can…

“Hook,” as I define it in this post, is probably not a legitimate psychological term. It’s more like hippie psychology. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But it’s such a vivid term and so accurate in its depiction of how this phenomenon works that I’m gonna stick with it, even if it might not pass the DSM test. A “hook” is an action or statement designed to provoke a response. A hook is always hostile and always bears evil intent. (See this prior post, “The Principal and the Profile.”) If you’re a working artist, people are throwing hooks at…

This is my favorite of all the posts we’ve ever run on this site. (Mainly because it’s not written by me.) I read it every few months just to psych myself up. It’s an article written by English concert pianist James Rhodes that appeared originally in the Guardian (UK). Why do I love Mr. Rhodes’ story of his bold move to change his life and become an artist? 1) Because James is a late bloomer. Much as I admire child prodigies, I hate them too because they found their calling so young and with so little agony. I like to see…

Shawn Coyne and I have been really dumb in the way we operate this blog and Shawn’s www.storygrid.com. We keep giving stuff away that we should be “monetizing.” Here we go again (actually Shawn is the main Dumb Guy behind this) with a five-part free mini-course based on Shawn’s wonderful book The Story Grid, about the craft of story editing. Click here to stream all five parts. Each video is about ten-twelve minutes long. Trust me, they are definitely binge-worthy. Okay. What is this mini-course exactly? Well, when Shawn brought out The Story Grid a few months ago, he was…

For years I lived “the way the day took me.” I’m not knocking that, either as a temporary default mode or as a way of life. It can be fun. You can find yourself, in a good way, in places you never imagined you’d be. You can meet great people. You can learn a lot. But at some point, that kind of life ended for me. I ended it. Since then I’ve been on a mission. I’m like the Blues Brothers. The day doesn’t sweep me away any more. My inner world, my universe of intention, is completely different from…

What single skill is most critical to the artist? Is it talent? Imagination? Mastery of her craft? Is it profundity of insight, depth of compassion, understanding of human nature? A passion for truth? Capacity for hard work? The ability to overcome criticism and negativity? Or is it something more crass, more commercial? The ability to brand herself? To network, to pitch, to create buzz? In my opinion it’s none of these. The single most critical skill for the artist is this: The ability to sit down and do her work. It sounds so simple. So obvious. It’s almost embarrassing to…

Have you heard of Blake Snyder? He was a screenwriter and writer of several terrific books about screenwriting (tragically he died in 2009 at fifty-one) including Save The Cat! (23 printings so far) and Save the Cat Goes To The Movies. Highly recommended. Blake Snyder was famous for his “beat sheet.” This was his original, funny, idiosyncratic (and very insightful) way of breaking down a story into its constituent elements. There are fifteen beats in the Blake Snyder beat sheet, starting with “Opening Image” and continuing through “Set-up,” “Catalyst,” “B Story,” “Bad Guys Close In,” “Dark Night of the Soul,”…

If you and I want to be taken seriously as writers, it goes without saying that we have to study the craft. However we do it (read Aristotle, enroll in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, study McKee and Coyne and Stephen King), we must learn the timeless principles of storytelling with the same thoroughness that a brain surgeon applies (we hope) before he starts drilling into our skulls. That’s the craft. But there’s another, even more important element to this enterprise. Our craft. What I mean by “our craft” are those stylistic and storytelling instincts that are unique to you and…

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is to take criticism. Notes. That dreaded memo from your editor that says, “Back to Square One, baby.” So I must give major, major plaudits to Harper Lee for what she did (according to the stories we’re all reading in the Times and elsewhere) after turning in Go Set A Watchman to her editor Tay Hohoff at Lippincott in 1957. The sensational aspect of the current Mockingbird/Watchman kerfuffle centers on Harper Lee’s radically different characterizations of Atticus Finch in the two books, specifically the less-than-knightly portrait in Go Set A…

I once did a rewrite on a porn flick. The producer wanted to impart a couple of guidelines before I began. We met for breakfast at a coffee shop in Santa Monica. What he told me has proved incredibly useful over the years—in all kinds of writing, including the most literary. “Every skin flick makes the same mistake,” said the producer (who was a thoroughly nice guy, like a suburban soccer dad). “When the movie gets to a sex scene, the story stops dead in its tracks. That’s my first marching order to you, kid: keep the story going through…