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…

Remember when Michael Jordan got into trouble for referring to his teammates on the Chicago Bulls as “my supporting cast?” He was, of course, only telling the truth. (Though Scotty Pippen, we must admit, has a right to be a little miffed.) But back to you and me and our novels based on our real lives. What about our spouses and kids and bosses and friends and the other crazy characters we’re going to write about? They may not like to think of themselves this way, but .. They are supporting characters in our story. Putting their egos aside, the…

  In the Comments to an earlier post in this series, “Using Your Real Life in Fiction,” Shawn wrote:   My question, which I think a lot of writers will have is this … Do you deliberately think of this stuff re: characters and their thematic roles, before you write your first draft? Or do you save this analytical/editor thinking for later? And then go back and tighten it all up?   Great question, pard. Lemme answer with a confession of exactly how dumb I am. A few years ago I wrote a novel called Killing Rommel. (No, it was…

(You guys, as of this post we’ll revert to the every-Wednesday mode for the remainder of the “Use Your Real Life in Fiction” series. I hope this recent barrage of Mon-Wed-Fri posts hasn’t clogged up too many friendly inboxes. I just got excited about this subject and couldn’t help myself.) We were talking in the previous post about killing off characters. We observed that this can be hard when the characters are based on people in our real lives. Can we kill off our best friend? Our neighborhood priest? Our mother? Answer Number One: We have to, if the drama demands…