Okay, it’s done. Today I wrap Draft #14 of the project that’s been kicking my butt and send it in to Shawn. Will it fly? We’ll see. But for the moment (a short moment), my job becomes about self-validation, i.e. giving myself some props. These “Reports from the Trenches” have been going on now for five and a half months. That means I’ve been rewriting a crashed-and-burned manuscript for that long.   Good job, Steve! Whatever happens, you have risen to the occasion. You have performed like a pro. You did not crap out (okay, maybe you whined and…

  The theme of the past months’ “Reports from the Trenches” has been          How can we resuscitate our story after it crashes?   This is no easy issue, as all of us know. It feels to me, being in the middle of the process right now, like I’m grabbing my story by the belt, turning it upside-down and shaking it till all the loose change tumbles out of its pockets. We’re trying to get our story to give up its secrets. To spill its guts. To sing like a canary. Here’s a trick that sometimes works:…

  I know I keep promising to finish with these “Reports from the Trenches.” But I’m still deeply in the muck and mire myself, and each week brings a fresh insight. So … This week’s flash is about blood ties. I first learned this trick from a wonderful book called Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Albert Zuckerman. Mr. Zuckerman is Ken Follett’s literary agent and something of a legend in the business. Blockbuster can be heavy going because it presents its case in such detail, but I recommend it highly nonetheless. Here’s one of the book’s brilliant insights:               Tie…

  I was having dinner a few nights ago with a young screenwriter and a big-time Hollywood literary agent. The writer was joking that her career had stalled on the “C” list. “If I had you for a year,” the agent said, “I’d get you high on the ‘A’ list.” The agent was serious, and a serious discussion followed. Most of the talk centered on the politics of career advancement. When I got home, though, I found my thoughts migrating to the craft aspects. How would a true, knowledgeable mentor elevate a talented writer’s career? How would he advance it…

[Not sure why, but my instinct tells me to re-run this post (the first in our “Reports from the Trenches” series) today, rather than posting a new one. Sometimes things need to be seen twice. I think this might be one of those times. So … here goes, in its entirety:] I’m gonna take a break in this series on Villains and instead open up my skull and share what’s going on in my own work right now. It ain’t pretty. I’m offering this post in the hope that an account of my specific struggles at this moment will be…

  For part of my time in Hollywood, I worked with a partner. I called him “Stanley” in Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t so I’ll continue that protocol here. Stanley was an established writer. He had been the force behind two big hits. I was the junior member of the team. Stanley was also a major sci-fi enthusiast. He had read all the magazines, the short stories, the novels, the collections. One of the ways Stanley developed movie projects (he was a producer too) was to option a short story or novella by, say, Philip K. Dick and then…

  My sense is that maybe it’s time to dial down our “Reports from the Trenches.” The big takeaway of the series actually came in the first week:   Even long-time successful writers crash and burn. It happens to me just like it happens to everybody.   I hope the follow-up posts have been helpful. But my sense is that we may have reached the point of diminishing returns. The last thing I want to do is bore anybody. So … Lemme try to wrap up today with a quick “lessons learned” post. Aside from the acknowledgment that EVERY WRITER…

I’ve always been a believer that our stories exist before we write them. Our job as writers, once we stumble upon these tales, is to bring them up into the sunlight in such a way that their best and most truly intended contour is revealed. What has screwed me up on my current project—the subject of this “Report from the Trenches” series—is that I excavated the story wrong the first time around. If we think of the tale as a giant dinosaur fossil, I inadvertently chopped off the legs and dug so deep under the skull that the whole damn…

  I said in last week’s post that, watching myself wrestle with this rewrite, I realize I’m attacking the problem on three levels. Level One (which we talked about last week) was about genre—making sure I knew what genre I was working in, and then re-hammering the narrative so that it lined up with the conventions and obligatory scenes of that genre. The second level of this work, what we’re gonna talk about today, is going back in the global sense to Basic Storytelling Principles. Specifically: A story must be about something. It must have a theme. The hero embodies…

  First lemme say thanks to everyone who is following this series. Believe me, writing these posts is helping me as much or more than it’s helping you. This new book is my nineteenth, I think. I’ve gone through this same hellish, tear-it-down-and-start-all-over-again process on almost every prior book, but I’ve never really paid attention to what I was doing. I just put my head down and ground it out. Having to write these posts has made me play witness to my own process. It helps. I never really knew what I was doing. Okay. Where do we stand today?…