Suppose you, an aspiring writer (or even an established one), got the chance to have a two-hour lunch with Stephen King? How much would that be worth? If you had to put a dollar figure on it, how much would you pay to have that experience? What price would make it fair to Stephen King for the expenditure of his time, for permitting you access to his wisdom? What would it be worth to you, just to hang out with the master of horror over a cheeseburger and fries? Or … Suppose you were a young architect and you…

[Today’s post is a revised and updated version of a favorite of mine that ran earlier in the blog’s cycle. It’s #1 in a new series starting today.]   There’s a story about Elvis: He was about to make his first movie (“Love Me Tender”) and he was getting a little nervous. He phoned the director and asked to speak with him privately. “What is it, Elvis?” the director asked when they got together. “You look upset. Is there anything you want to ask me?” “Yes,” said Elvis. “Am I gonna be asked to smile in this movie?” The director…

  There’s a term Shawn uses that I had never heard before: Story nerd. (He claims proudly to be one himself.) A story nerd, as I understand it, is someone who loves to get into the geeky details and “inside baseball” mechanics of storytelling. A story nerd knows what a Value Shift is. She’s intimate with concepts like “beats” and “reveals.” She knows the Five Commandments of Storytelling. A story nerd is kinda like a Trekkie except she doesn’t wear Vulcan ears or appear in public dressed as a Klingon. Me, I’d use a different term: Professional writer. Anyway, there…

  You were born for adversity. It’s in your DNA as much as it’s in the DNA of a shark or an eagle or a lion. You were made for hard times. The species of Homo sapiens has survived and prevailed not because we are faster or stronger than all the competing creatures. Every one of them is better equipped by nature with fangs and claws and wings and fur. Every one is better adapted to hunt, to kill, to survive drought and heat and cold. Yeah, our race has a better brain. And yes, we figured out the advantages…

  A few years ago I wrote a book called Killing Rommel. Killing Rommel is a novel set during WWII in the North Africa campaign. Its heroes are the men of the Long Range Desert Group, a true historical British commando unit that fought behind the lines against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the German Afrika Korps. The first time I heard the name Long Range Desert Group, I fell in love with it. I said to myself, “I don’t know what this is, but I gotta write a book about it.” “Long Range.” Way cooler that Short Range. Even…

  One of our earlier posts in this series on the Professional Mindset was called “You, Inc.” It observed that many Hollywood screenwriters (including me) find it useful to incorporate themselves. These writers don’t perform their labors as themselves but as “loan-outs” from their one-man or one-woman corporations. Their contracts are “f/s/o”—for services of—themselves. I’m a big fan of this way of operating. Not so much for the financial or legal benefits, which really aren’t particularly significant, but for the mindset this style of working promotes. If you and I are a corporation, we’ve gotta get our act together. Amateur…

  When we finish any work of art or commerce and expose it to judgment in the real world, three things can happen: Everybody loves it. Everybody hates it. Nobody notices that it even exists. [Continuing our exploration of the Professional Mindset, let me repurpose this post that first ran about four years ago.] All three present you and me as writers and artists with major emotional challenges, and all three drive deep into the most profound questions of life and work. It will not surprise you, I suspect, if I say that all three responses are impostors. None of…

  My first agent was a gentleman named Barthold Fles. He was seventy years old. When I fictionalized him in The Knowledge, I made him ninety-six. But he was really seventy. I was twenty-nine at the time, so Bart had me by forty-one years. He was Swiss. He had represented Bertolt Brecht and even Carl Jung. He had seen and done everything. One day Bart said to me, “How much is 427 minus one?” I gave the obvious answer: 426.   “No,” said Bart. “It’s zero.”   He was speaking about pages in a novel. If the full book is…

  We lost a valued member of our online community this past week—David Y.B. Kaufmann of New Orleans and Houston passed away after a two-year battle with cancer. If you’ve read the Comments section of this blog, you know David. His contributions were always keen and insightful, and pretty funny too. He was also a damn good writer. His series, The Scotch & Herring Mysteries, was original, smart, and one-of-a-kind. He leaves seven children, his wife Nechama, and a round of grandchildren on the way. We send our deepest condolences to all the Kaufmann family. We’re all one good guy…

  [Continuing our series on the Professional Mindset … ]   I’m reading a great book now (thanks, Bill Wickham, for turning me onto it) called Bugles and a Tiger, My Life in the Gurkhas by John Masters. This is the kind of book I absolutely devour—a straight-ahead memoir, no plot, no characters, just an absolutely true account of a fascinating life experience, in this case the tale of a young Brit who served in India in the 30s in a legendary Gurkha battalion. What exactly is a Gurkha? The Gurkhas are Nepalese peasantry. Modest of stature, often illiterate, incredibly…