Being a writer is not a natural life. Of course it’s not natural working in a coal mine or a cubicle either. What is a “natural life” anyway? Is it living in alignment with evolution? Is it the nomadic life, the hunter’s life, the farmer’s life? If we live in the city, have we cut ourselves off from the organic voyages, migrations, and rhythms of the human soul? The life of the artist is artificial. Art by definition is artificial. What exactly is the artist’s life? What shape does it take, day-to-day? What you and I do as artists and…

Giving notes is the phrase used in the movie business to mean reviewing or critiquing a screenplay or treatment or even a short pitch. Getting notes is when you’re the one on the receiving end. Both positions are really hard. I’ve lost friends. People have stopped talking to me. For a while I simply refused to give notes. I would not read anything. It was too dangerous. Here are the rules I follow now: 1. I NEVER read anything from someone I don’t know. Beyond the agony flowing in both directions there’s the problem of plagiarism. Suppose I’m working on…

This is an edgy subject and maybe I should stay away from it, but I feel like I want to squeeze it a little more, so here goes. To review quickly, we were saying a couple of weeks ago that sometimes a public figure or personality (the “principal”) will be stalked or cyber-stalked or just plain bugged by a fan/frenemy/hater (the “profile.”) And that each of us probably has both tendencies-in-potential in our psyches. The reason I’m exploring this is to see if we can learn something that will help us. A couple of observations: You don’t have to be…

Did you see that docu on TV the other night about the history of the Eagles? I was watching it (enjoying it tremendously) when one moment leapt out at me. I’m paraphrasing from memory now, so forgive me if I get some of this wrong: Glenn Frey was telling the story. He was talking about the early 70s in L.A., before the Eagles were even a band, or maybe just after they had gotten started. He and Don Henley were playing gigs (they had backed up Linda Ronstadt for a while) but they were not writing their own material. They…

My friend Jane worked for years for a legendary personality of the 20th century. I’m respecting her wishes by not using the gentleman’s name. Let’s call him Michael. Michael was a target for the tabloids and the paparazzi. He was besieged relentlessly by fans and admirers, cranks, crazies, and outright stalkers. He lived on an estate. The place became a fortress. It got so bad that Michael had to employ bodyguards and a professional “threat assessor.” The threat assessor wound up teaching everyone on Michael’s staff how to respond to a certain type of persistent assailant. The dynamic was so…

I was laid up in bed with the flu this week and wound up watching the first two Bourne movies, starring Matt Damon, back-to-back. The experience got me thinking about the Understory. When I start a new book, I open a file and title it UNDERSTORY. The understory is the architecture that undergirds and supports the surface story. In the first Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity, the surface story starts like this: Jason Bourne is floating unconscious at sea, with two bullets in his back. A fishing boat rescues him. When he comes to, JB has no memory of who…

I’ve been feeling a little bad about the first Opportunities Are Bullshit post a few weeks ago. Particularly after Callie’s wonderful “Nella from France” follow-on. My post was a bit of a rant, I confess. Ventilation of a pet peeve. I probably overstated the case. So lemme try again. We all want our stuff to be seen. If we’re singers or actors or website designers, we want our work to find its hour in the sun. So we’re vulnerable to “opportunities.” What is an “opportunity?” It’s what a producing entity–a website, a seminar, a movie or music producer, a publisher,…

I first came upon this concept in the writings of Laurens van der Post, the great South African. Are you familiar with him? He wrote one of my favorite books, The Seed and the Sower. The following comes from The Lost World of the Kalahari: It has sometimes appeared to me that fever is designed, in part, to magnify reality, so that the imponderable contribution of the spirit to the malaise which produces fever, can become visible. There seems to be deep within it a rounding-up process of time which brings past, present, and future all lucidly together in the…

We were talking last week about stakes and jeopardy. It is critical in any story, I was saying, that the stakes for all characters be as high as possible—preferably life and death. There’s a further aspect to stakes/jeopardy that might be worth exploring this week. The stakes in a story should always be on-theme. Lemme digress for a minute. As I’m writing this, I’m wondering, “Is this subject of interest?” It is to me, but I’m wondering if getting into such nuts-and-bolts detail about storytelling is only tedious to readers who log onto this blog. Am I boring you with…

A few weeks back, we were talking about this tidbit of wisdom from screenwriter Jack Epps: “You can’t do everything in one draft.” The corollary, we said, is to focus on only one aspect of your manuscript/screenplay/videogame at a time. One aspect per draft. Today let’s talk about stakes. (Ideally you and I should have thought deeply about this before we even started Draft #1. But let’s be real. Most of us plunge in and swim like hell for the far shore. So maybe we need to regroup for Drafts #2 through #15 and revisit certain essentials.) What are “stakes”…