Continuing Banned Book Week, Ron Charles and his editor conspired to give Ron’s essay the incendiary title “Do we really still need Banned Books Week?” In fact, he even starts giving you umbrage fuel in the first paragraph, but then he talks to the people who and whaddya know? Yup. People will be people and some people will always think that your dainty mind needs protection (see also, Monday’s post).
As friends know on social media, I’m a big fan of Banned Book Week that occurs every Fall. Given that people continue to challenge books and, really, are only looking out for you, whomever you might be, I find it a good tradition to continue. Several members of my family are or were librarians — and I well remember challenges to books growing up from parents who were worried our dainty minds would be perverted…
Look, writers are gonna write… except when they come up with voluminous excuses not to. So, periodic posts like this one to help motivate people are always handy. In other words, enjoy this piece about how Laura Vanderkam gets her writing done while having 4 children, blogging, speaking, and presumably breathing and eating.
For this Labor Day, a day where many of us are sure not to labor, it somehow seems appropriate to share this piece by Mark Marino about how to have more joyous writing exercises. Sounds like pretty good motivation to me.
As something to shake things up with your writing, consider this piece on “still eating oranges” I see pop up from time to time. It’s about Kishōtenketsu, a storytelling structure familiar in many Asian narratives. The article here focuses a lot on how it’s different from the Western focus on conflict, but I think it’s also worth looking at simply for the notion of the third act twist. Within a given narrative, say a narrative chock…
I was a screener for a film festival recently. It’s something I’ve done before many times — and just like writers reading a lot of others’ writing, watching a lot of films can give you perspective on both what you want to do and what you don’t want to do as a filmmaker. As you might imagine, a screener’s job is partly to vet films. You’re trying to score all the submissions to see which…
Just as the fictional Felix Unger asserted his inability to do impossible cooking tasks, so too would Neil Simon probably protest any prowess at writing, but let’s be honest. If writing were cooking, Neil Simon was the magic chef of scriptwriting. (The idea of Neil Simon being a figment of his fictional creation’s imagination seems like the fun neurotic thought to occupy one of Neil Simon’s characters.) And if you recall my piece on Sam…
I will leave it to you to determine whether I am one of the sharks or am merely swimming with sharks, but I will be at a “Shark Tank for Filmmakers” event this Saturday out in the wilds of Northern Virginia, where the passenger jets roam. The event is organized by fellow filmmaker Ron Newcomb, who has been tirelessly working on building the narrative film community in the DC region pretty much since I’ve known…
Most of the creatives I know instinctively want an audience. When they think about why, the immediate answers of “someone who likes my work” or “someone who buys my stuff” are natural. I mean, what’s not to like about emotional and financial validation? Bring forth the audience! But building an audience is hard. In fact, it’s something of a slog — a seemingly Sisyphean slog (which I’m experiencing first-hand as I try and build an audience for…
If you’re a regular listener of Scriptnotes, you’ll know that the hosts (especially Craig Mazin) have little time for screenwriting “gurus.” So you probably won’t be surprised by the this article by Stephen Galloway that was in The Hollywood Reporter earlier this week all about the high cost and non-return of many a “pitch fest” held in New York and L.A.