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…

  I’ve quoted Dan Sullivan before and I’m gonna do it again. Do you know him? He’s the founder and CEO of Strategic Coach and one of the great mentors to entrepreneurs in the world. So, in keeping with this series on the Professional Mindset, let me rip off a few more of his ideas for you. (Thanks, Dan!) Dan tells the story that when he was in the army stationed in Korea, one of his jobs was putting together shows for the troops. Frank Sinatra came over one time. Dan studied him carefully and, as he says,   One…

  This is the fourth post in our series called “The Professional Mindset.” Let’s pause here and flash back to what this stuff is all about. It’s about Resistance. We adopt the Professional Mindset for one reason only: to combat our own internal self-sabotage. The professional mindset is a weapon against Resistance, like AA is a weapon against alcoholism. Don’t laugh. The analogy is exact. Have you, the writer, ever woken up metaphorically face-down in the gutter at five in the morning with an empty bottle beside you? I have. Have you ever said to yourself, “I am powerless against…

[This is Post #3 in our new series, “The Professional Mindset.”]   I had a friend named Victoria when I was working in Hollywood. Victoria was a successful screenwriter, very much a role model for me. One day Victoria took me out to lunch and gave me some insight into how she handled herself as a professional in “this town.”   Steve, you and I are going up every day against Twentieth-Century Fox and Warner Bros. and Paramount. They’re our competition. We’ve got to be just as organized as they are, just as tough, and just as smart.   Victoria…

  [This is Post #2 in our new series, “The Professional Mindset.”]   When you and I were working on the line at Ford in Dearborn, we had to worry about our production quotas, our standards of workmanship, our supervisor’s evaluations of us. What we didn’t have to worry about was the structure of our day. That structure was imposed on us from outside. Then one day we quit. Suddenly we were artists. We were entrepreneurs. We thought it would be easy. We were free! Nothing could stop us! It turned out to be the hardest thing we’d ever done.…

  Are you a writer? A filmmaker? A dancer? Then you’re an entrepreneur. You have more in common with the young Steve Jobs and the early Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg than you do with your dad who worked all his life for AT+T or your aunt who’s five months away from collecting her pension from the Post Office. [Today’s post, by the way, is the kick-off for a new extended series that I’m calling, until someone comes up with a catchier title, “The Professional Mindset.” Over the succeeding weeks we’re going to examine the inner world of the writer…

A case could be made that many, many books and movies are about one thing and one thing only: getting Person X to say to Person Y, “I love you.” The trick is our characters can never use those blatant, overt words. That wouldn’t be cool. It wouldn’t ring true to life. And it wouldn’t possess the power and the impact we want. In fiction, “I love you” has to come in subtext, not text. Here’s one of the ways William Goldman did it in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It’s the final scene. The outlaws are shot up…

  We said a few posts ago that sometimes we, as writers, have to tart real life up. Real life is too ordinary. It’s too interior. It’s too boring. We have to heighten the drama, ramp up the stakes. Otherwise readers won’t care. But how, exactly, do we perform this wizardry? Do we just dream up wild stuff—sex, violence, zombies—and hurl it into the stew willy-nilly? How do we know what’s appropriate? How can we tell when we’ve gone too far? The answer brings me back to my favorite subject: theme. The principle is:   We may fictionalize but only…