“A book or idea with a strong hook has the relevance of something so personal and meaningful that your audience, tribe, readers, the media can’t resist spreading the word about it. It’s a mini zeitgeist. It has a relevant, catchy twist that pulls people in—and the hook makes it easier to talk about and explain to others as well.”—Janet Goldstein

The human brain is the laziest apparatus in the world. If you start to revise before you’ve reached the end, you’re likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing. Unless I find I’ve made some drastic mistake in characterization or basic structure, I never go back until I’ve written the last page.—Pearl S. Buck

Do things excellently. No matter what pathway you choose, don’t settle for mediocre. Make it very simple or wildly elaborate, but bring care to the writing, the production, the structure, and design—all of it.—Janette Goldstein & Suzanne Falter-Barns

For me the criterion of a good novel is that the author has created a total world in which his people move credibly…The novel is just a little cosmos and we’re prepared to accept it, it’s just a real world…I get thousands of letters from people who say how totally immersed they were in the world and how sorry they were to have it end. That works for me.—James Michener

Tips for Writers

“Platform, at its essence, is finding the need out there that you can fill.”—Suzanne Falter-Barns

Start to write, and let one thing lead to another. Whatever you do, don’t start to be funny. As for myself, I start my stories with no given destination in my mind. I simply let the stories write themselves. It seems that each paragraph leads to the next.—Ring Lardner

Why you? Why this idea? Why now?”—Janet Goldstein

Inspiration

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.—Alan Alda [via M.J. Ryan, The Power of Patience]

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.—Margaret Thatcher [via M.J. Ryan, The Power of Patience]

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself…every day begin the task anew.—St. Francis de Sales [via M.J. Ryan, The Power of Patience]

George Lucas put up his own money to make Star Wars because no one believed in his vision. By the time the movie came out, he was completely broke. But he ended up becoming phenomenally wealthy precisely because he had been unable to sell any of the rights to the film or sequels. --M.J. Ryan, The Power of Patience

Inspiration

…He is a man who always has need of emptying himself, of completely emptying himself, it is necessary that he should be greatly stimulated so that he could be active enough to empty himself completely.—Gertrude Stein, Picasso

Every character should have an outer goal (external goal) and an inner need (what their emotional journey is about: what are they dealing with? Overcoming fear, guilt, abandonment, grief, abuse, needing to forgive, what is it that is propelling their inner world and making them do what they do?).—Claire Hutchinson

I never miss an opportunity to try to point out that poetry is made of words, yes. That it is made of words and sound, yes. But above all, in structural elements, poetry is made of lines. Unless the line is working, the rhythm is gone, and the power of poetry over the unsayable has disappeared with it.—Archibald MacLeish

"Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good."

- Samuel Johnson via Michael A. Simpson

Inspiration

The human brain is the laziest apparatus in the world. If you start to revise before you’ve reached the end, you’re likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing. Unless I find I’ve made some drastic mistake in characterization or basic structure, I never go back until I’ve written the last page.—Pearl S. Buck

Inspiration

I never specifically describe the sex at because it’s such a bore laid bare. My readers wonder if they’re normal if they don’t have sex upside down, swinging from a chandelier. So I’m their escape, their fairy tale. I give them the glamour and the beautiful clothes and the marvelous attentive men they are starved of.

— Barbara Cartland

Hollywood would rather pay more for more than less for less.

Screenwriters:

“Too good to be true. Remove goody-goodies from your script. Every character worth recommending is a mixture of positive and negative traits.”— Jennifer Lerch, 500 Ways to Beat the Hollywood Script Reader

Yes, it’s true,

the gatekeepers can tell in the first two pages whether your work is ready for representation. Because so many people seek representation they don’t have time to keep reading.

NOVEL REVISION

It’s finding the emotional door you have to go through. You have to find a way, an angle in on the characters, so that your emotional dope, your limits, concerns, needs and hopes at that moment can be expressed through the vehicle of the made-up story. And then you have to shape the story as entertainment so other people can feel that same emotion.—Stephen King

Definition of a Producer

I was watching “Tales from the Script” (highly recommended for anyone who even dares to think of being a screenwriter) and heard from a writer whose name escapes me: “A producer is someone who lies long enough and well enough that the lie becomes the truth.”

I’ve always said the difference between a con man and a visionary in Hollywood is success. Using the word “lie,” of course, puts it in a negative framework. Belief and vision and faith are the positive terms for practical visualization, where you not only see the picture but you do and say everything you can to make others see the picture until, one day, the picture is.

The producer is the one who dares to walk the tightrope between dream and reality, like the rope between the Two Towers. What makes a great producer is that he never gives up, even when the writer does, even when the studio does, even when everyone else does.