Once we turn pro (and even before we do), our Muse has plans for us. Those plans are our career-in-potential. They exist, whether we choose to believe in them or not. And they’re operating upon us, influencing us like the gravitational pull of an enormous invisible star. If you’re a writer, your career-in-potential is a shelf of books. Your books. Books you’ve written. They exist now, even if you haven’t started Book #1. Just as your family exists, even if you haven’t yet met the mother of your children. It helps, I believe, to think in these terms. Seventeen years…

To say that a voice (or a look or a sound) is “real” in art requires quotation marks. We will never speak in our “real” voice because the very act of speaking in a compelling and interesting manner requires, first, a point of view—and every point of view implies a voice that is dictated, and thus made “true,” by the context in which that point of view is taken. Was Churchill’s voice “real?” Was Homer’s? Our “real” voice, when we’re lucky enough to find it, becomes the voice of that point of view. The more closely the voice coincides with…

In screenplay lingo, writers and directors refer to the “A” story and the “B” story. (There can be a “C,” “D,” and “E” story, but let’s leave those alone for the moment.) The “A” story is the dramatic core of the movie. It’s the foreground—the primary throughline that the protagonist follows. The “B” story is a supporting saga, running on a parallel (and often seemingly-unrelated) track. In The Hangover, the “A” story is the guys’ efforts to find their friend Doug. The “B” story is Stu’s (Ed Helms) struggle to break out of thrall to his shrew girlfriend back in…

We were talking last week about an All Is Lost Moment coming immediately before a Turning Pro moment. We cited Rocky, The Hangover and Big Night as examples. Sounds arcane, I know. Hang in with me. In a movie, the All Is Lost moment is that crisis (usually two-thirds to four-fifths of the way through the story) where the hero hits the wall. He has failed in all his efforts to attain his objective; he’s completely stuck. There’s no way out and no way forward. In The Descendants, for example [screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash],…

Since the publication of Turning Pro a month ago, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about certain concepts in the book. One that keeps sticking in my head—and demanding deeper inspection—is the moment of turning pro. I’m going to dedicate the next few weeks on Writing Wednesdays to further thoughts on this subject. I want to talk about its relationship to the All Is Lost moment, the two components of the All Is Lost moment (the second one of which I’m calling in my head the “breakthrough moment”)—and I want to talk about the “B” story and how that…

On the artist’s journey, we don’t get better by increments, we get better by fits and starts. The trajectory is not a smoothly-ascending curve, but a herky-jerky spasm-fest marked by seeming dead-ends, plateaus, dark nights of the soul, intervals of boredom and stasis, not to mention bouts of terror, despair and self-doubt, which are followed, if we’re lucky, by quantum leaps to the next level. In other words, we advance by breakthroughs. In last week’s post I talked about my friend Paul, who overnight leap-frogged two or three levels in his writing. What I didn’t say was that that leap…

My friend Paul had a writing breakthrough last week. I mean a serious one, where his game elevated two or three levels in one shot. It’s tremendously encouraging to witness something like that because for most of us, most of the time, the experience of artistic enterprise is like toiling in the muck, slinging shovel after shovel of ooze and wondering if we’re advancing by so much as a centimeter, or—our direst fear—falling back. That’s where Paul has been for as long as I’ve known him. Now, all of a sudden, POW!  His breakthrough was like a touring golf pro…

I never talk about a project I’m working on. It’s bad luck. But something happened a few nights ago that made me think I should make an exception, both for the sake of my own thinking and for sharing an insight or two. So I’ll keep depiction of the project vague but the wisdom as clear as I can make it. I was at a professional event with a friend who, each time he introduced me to a new acquaintance, described and made a pitch for the project I’m working on. (Don’t ask why.) He did this a number of…

We’ve talked over the past weeks about the hero’s journey as myth, as movie or literature, as a blueprint in our psyches. But what is it in real life? What is the spontaneous hero’s journey? One of our readers (and my friend) is a journalist named Andy Lubin. Andy has written in to our Comments section taking issue with the term “hero.” He feels such an exalted term should apply only to soldiers or Marines who save their comrades’ lives in combat, or firemen who run into burning buildings. The truth is, Andy himself is a hero in the sense…

Last Wednesday I posted in this space the first two chapters from Turning Pro. This week I want to include the following four. Mainly because I think they work nicely as a unit—and because together they give a real flavor for what the book is and what it’s about. Next week: back to our regular Writing Wednesdays. Now, chapters three through six from Turning Pro: 3.  MY LIFE AS AN AMATEUR When I was in my twenties, I lived for a winter in a boarding house in Durham, North Carolina that served as a halfway station for patients emerging from state mental…