Category Archives: Writing
A Quick Guide To Self-Publishing Fiction Works
If you’re tired of getting one rejection letter after the other from publishing houses, then maybe it’s time that you try to have your works of fiction self-published for much better chances of getting noticed. Continue reading
Getting People To Buy And Read Your Works Of Fiction
In the olden days of fiction publishing and marketing, the author sent her precious package of verbiage to an overworked and underpaid editor of a publishing company and waited for an acceptance (more often a rejection) letter in the mail. Continue reading
You Can Write A Novel
If you’ve always wanted to write a novel and then, when you decide to start find you are stuck, don’t worry. Even prolific authors find it hard to get started with a new writing project. There are a few things you need to organize properly before embarking on your next Pulitzer Prize winning project. Working out who, what, where, when, why and how your novel will develop is a process that you need to go through in order to get started. Continue reading
Screenwriting Books – 5 Suggested Resources
There are thousands of different screenwriting books in the world. Here is a glimpse at 5 screenwriting books that my USC students have read and found useful: * The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters: Insider Secrets from Hollywood’s Top Writers. Written by Karl Iglesias, this book offers interviews with professional screenwriters who give insight to the entire process of screenwriting, from writing to selling, and beyond. Continue reading
A Gator Guide For Three Ways To Sell
Now that you’ve written your movie, it’s time to talk about sales. You can’t be a successful screenwriter, after all, unless you get into the process of selling scripts and getting them on track to being made into features. Here are three ways that you can go about selling scripts. Continue reading
Sell A Screenplay – A Gator Guide On Three Things That You Should Know About Development
If you’ve been lucky enough to sell a screenplay, it’s a great achievement. Take time for celebration. Once you’ve gone through the process of selling and have been successful, you will enter the development phase, where you will be trying to interpret the goals that the buyer has in mind for your script. Here are three tips you must know during this process: Continue reading
Creative Screenwriting – Fresh Ideas Make For Success
When John Watson and I first came to Hollywood, we decided to meet with the marketing analysis people at Universal. We asked them one question: what do audiences want in their feature films? The answer that came back was stories that were “new”, “interesting” and “different”. Although the studios themselves were always puzzled on how to sell something they’d never seen before, they also knew the power of originality. If you take Steven Spielberg, for example, there really was no movie like Jaws before Jaws, or E.T. Close Encounters was also highly original. And to this day, Spielberg still brings audiences to theaters because they know they will experience things they’ve never seen before. Continue reading
Screenwriting Course – What Works For You?
Which course to take? It’s a tough question because it’s hard to evaluate something before you’ve experienced it. My own son recently decided he wanted to take two different screenwriting courses to gain some new perspectives. He found one was more rigid, and the other was more sympatico. Continue reading
Maneuvering The Fiction Book Publishing Process
If you want your works of fiction to be published, it takes careful planning and strategizing, among others. Getting a publisher to approve your fiction takes know-how, determination – and a little bit of luck. Continue reading
Screenwriting Tips – Gator Guide For Surviving Creative Anxiety
I believe that the same, wonderful part of our brains that brings us our creativity is the identical engine that also helps give us anxiety; both experiences give us a sensory input of a variety of possibilities. When these thoughts are creative they can be quite magical and help piece together our ideas – but at the same time the human animal has evolved over millions of years to be a survivor, and at a certain point anxiety became a positive safety mechanism for pre-thinking possibilities of outcomes that might be dangerous to us. Literally, complacent animals died, whereas those that learned to think about negative possibilities avoided disaster and survived. We have inherited this mechanism (which seems more potent the more creative you are). In a way, this kind of probing of dark thoughts are really trying to help you avoid difficult outcomes. But when our creative engine turns to dark, negative thoughts like “wow, you’ll never be able to write anything good”, or “you’re wasting your time” or “this idea will be rejected left right and center” – those versions are not usually helpful. Continue reading