Here’s a concept from the world of Mad Men that has served me (and saved me) many times over the years: The idea of “new business.” When I worked in the ad biz in New York many moons ago, we had to account for our hours every week on a time sheet. The creative department was divided into ten or twelve groups, each with four or five two-man teams—writer and art director—with a creative director as each group’s boss. A creative group might have four or five clients that it was responsible for. On your time sheet you’d see something…

Advertising is a much-reviled industry (selling us junk we don’t need, etc.) Let me not be last in line to heap my own scorn and derision upon this hell-spawned profession. That being said, my own time as a copywriter (I worked for Grey, Benton & Bowles and Ted Bates in NYC) was more valuable than a Ph.D. from Harvard. I also met some of the best and most interesting people I’ve ever known, many of whom remain friends to this day. So what did I learn in the ad biz?  First lesson (see this post from 2009): Nobody Wants To…

My friend Kate tells this story: I was visiting my friend Bob Gilbert, who among many other talents was a fabulous boat builder. This was at Harvey Swindall’s boatyard in Ventura [California], where Bob was building a 92-foot yacht based on the plans for the famous ocean racer Bloodhound, which had been built originally in the 1870s at the Fife Boat Works in Fairlie, Scotland. The new Bloodhound’s keel had been laid. The ribs were in place. Bob showed me around, pointing out all the little details of construction, which he, being a master builder, had gone to incredible lengths…

Writers of fiction learn early that they can write characters who are smarter than they are. How can that be? It doesn’t seem possible. The answer lies in the Mystery. The place that we write from (or paint from or compose from or innovate from) is far deeper than our petty personal ego. That place is beyond intellect. It’s deeper than rational thought. It’s instinct. It’s intuition. It’s imagination. If you and I cast Meryl Streep as Queen Boudica in our next Hollywood blockbuster, will we have any doubt that she can pull it off (even though she has never…

Everybody loves the vertical game. We all thrill to the deep ball, the long completion, the 55-yard bomb that breaks the game open. (Yes, I’ve been watching a lot of football over the Holidays.) The problem is that, a lot of the time, the guys we’re playing against are as good or better than we are. Or they’re lucky, or they’re having a great day, or they’ve just studied our tendencies and know how to counter them. The defense won’t let us throw the deep ball. We’re dying to. We’re on fire to. But the bastards just won’t let us.…

A couple of years ago when I was in Africa, I got a chance to visit a Masai village. The place was so far out in the boonies that we had to fly to it. There were no roads. We had two city Masai with us, a young man and a young woman, who did the translating. When we landed, we could see that there was a commotion going on. Our guides explained to us, after speaking with several of the camp elders, that the shaman had just determined that the site upon which the village had made camp was…

The past two and a half years have been really rough for me. Issues of love and work, health and mortality have pushed me into places I’ve never been before. Yet through all this balagan (chaos, in Hebrew), I’ve produced some of the best work of my life. I think there’s a connection. It’s a myth, in my opinion, that we need to have our ducks in a row to produce good work. When I first started writing seriously, in my late twenties, I would work for ten hours a day, in the prime of health, with nothing to distract…

Shakespeare, Milton and Dante all understood villains. They loved villains. Their villains are their greatest creations. Directors savor villains because villains light up the screen. Actors love to play bad guys. What could be more memorable onscreen than crushing a half-grapefruit into your wife’s face, as James Cagney did to Mae Clarke in Public Enemy, or, as Richard Widmark did in Kiss of Death, push an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs? But what every bad guy needs most of all is a great Villain Speech. From our own era, it’s tough to top the “Greed…

I was in Israel for most of the past month, doing research for a book. That’s why I haven’t been able to deliver a new Writing Wednesday each week. My apologies! The sojourn in the Holy Land produced mucho grist for future WWs, however. But we can bang one post out immediately: Product Recommendations. Stuff I took with me that actually worked. I offer the following consumer report (with NO connections, financial or otherwise, to any product recommended or reviled below) for my fellow aspiring journalist/novelist globetrotters … 1. SwissGear IBEX laptop backpack. I had noticed, doing book signings at…