Storytellersunplugged

When Inspiration Strikes It’s Best to be Prepared by David Niall Wilson Sometimes you get images that stick. It’s a good idea to write them down, even if you can’t currently pry yourself from life or leisure long enough to put them to proper use, or to complete them. I’ve been toying with the sadness of Greyhound stations, the way they seem to suck in people with no real place to go, the poor, those whose loves or lives are in tatters — people giving up and going back, and people hoping that something at the other end of a bouncing, lonely ride might be better. Anyway, this train of thought started me thinking about inspiration, how it comes at the oddest moments, and what you can do to preserver those moments so that when you desperately need the shot in the arm they provide, they are ready to hand.There are a lot of ways you can accomplish this. I know people who still carry the old spiral notebooks, or small pads of paper with them at all times, and keep them by the bedside. I have one friend who has a digital audio recorder attached to his belt. I have one of those, Trish bought it for me because I thought it would be a good way to capture things as I drove. I used it for a while, but it turned out to be a detriment to my driving, and so I let it go. I’m not a proponent of talking on the phone, doing makeup, or otherwise engaging in extra-curricular activities while behind the wheel, so I opted not to become part of that particular problem.My own solution is to worry over the idea in my head until I get to a keyboard, or a notebook, and then to write something down. It’s usually not good enough for me to just write a single-sentence idea, or words to remind me of what I was thinking. I’ve done that and come back later to stare fruitlessly at what I wrote, absolutely unable to make sense of it. Instead, what I do is that I put the image to use. I write small snippets of things that may, or may not ever see the light of day, but that capture the thing that is bothering me, eating at me, or otherwise making a mental nuisance of itself.

As an example, I present an excerpt from nothing in particular involving my current obsession with the Greyhound station - a disembodied paragraph or two that might have been scribbled in a bus station, or on the napkin at a Denny’s in Hoboken, left behind to be swept up when the bus-boys come through…

“James slouched down the sidewalk with one shoulder to the grimy wall and the other tucked in close. His tattered sea bag curled across his back like a hump, and his long hair clung to the top of it, spreading out like crusty seaweed. Ahead, the glow of the Greyhound terminal leaked into the night, dragging him onward.

James hated bus stations. They were too bright. The lights illuminated the grime and stains of the ages. Emotions, trapped for eternity, oozed from the walls. The grey dog was the chosen transport of the damned, and their legacy etched itself into each terminal and was ground into the asphalt outside the gray, filthy glass doors. Winos gathered at shrines like these, toasting the lost and the lonely, those looking for things they’d never find and leaving things they’d never forget.

The wind pressed into his back, spitting him from the city and into the maw of the future without regret. ”

I have that now. I don’t know if I’ll ever use it, but I know that it captures (somewhat) the thoughts I’ve been chewing and trying to digest, and it allows me to save it to the “idea file” and move on to the next mental obsession. I have a folder on my computer filled with things like this. Back in the day, I had a file folder with clippings, hand-written notes, and print-outs of just this sort of thing. I also had / have a list of titles that have occurred to me that started as just that - words with no story behind them, like “A Plethora of Penguins,” and “The Fall of the House of Escher.” Some of these (the latter is one such) became stories along the way. Perusing that list while seeking inspiration for a themed anthology has saved me more than once, and at least once I took one of the snippets like the Greyhound “clip” above and it became a novel - that was my most recent book, “Ancient Eyes.” The snippet I began with was something I wrote down after watching the movie “Next of Kin,” with Patrick Swayze and Liam Nisson. I never know when, or if I’ll make use of them, but I save them slavishly.

One day on the way to work I saw a truck loaded up with cars that had been compressed into cubes. I started wondering just what might have been crushed along with the upholstery, electronics, and engine.

One day a man passed me in a car with eighteen colors of primer - two windows covered with plastic and duct-tape, one big black boot propped up and out the window, slouched down and driving crazily. I recorded it as I remembered it the moment I reached my office.

There is a house along my drive to work where, in the summer, vines grow up a power pole and stretch out along the metal cord that braces the wood and holds it upright, as well as along the line leading to the house. It’s a solitary home, standing beside a cotton field in the middle of nowhere. When the vines grow in full, it looks exactly as if there is a large woman pointing an accusing finger straight at that place, and it stays that way all summer.

Another pole, further down, grows broad shoulders and, at dusk, looks like Bigfoot.

What if a Mastodon was discovered frozen in the ice - and when they managed to chip it out and study it, they found a bullet in its heart?

What if a hurricane disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle? What then, word man? What then?

I’ll leave you with another possible method of storing these ideas, a thing I’ve been trying for a few weeks now. I’ve been writing tiny flash-fiction stories that capture inspirations and actually give them (for what it’s worth) a modicum of closure. These short shorts I’m writing are born of single words …the title of this was

“Indifference.”

She was sure that he’d follow her. When she told him that it was up to him, that if she walked out that door, she wouldn’t come back, she thought it would be just like every other time. They would argue. They would fight. They would tangle themselves in the sheets and stick together for hours and wake up wrapped around one another at the beginning of a new day.The door closed behind her with a snap, and he didn’t follow.She made it to the elevator and hesitated, watching the door, sure he’d open it and follow.Nothing. The elevator doors slid shut slowly and, numb, she pressed the button for the lobby.

* * *

He hit the stairs running. He’d waited until she was out of site, indifference painted on his face like a mask. He’d barely held it in; the hurt in her had eyes floored him. Still, he wanted this time to be something more - a turning point after which they saw how bad things could become, and the fights ceased. He ran, but halfway down, he tripped. It was a stupid misstep. He hit the wall hard on his shoulder, screamed, and staggered to his feet. He turned and stumbled down, but too slowly now. He’d have to catch her on the street…he thought his arm might be broken. His heart felt the same.

* * *

She stepped out into the lobby. It was empty. She pushed her way through the door without looking back, blind with tears and unable to think. She stepped into the street and stopped.

The bus did not stop.

* * *

As he hit the lobby, he heard the sirens.

—DNW
—Macabre Ink

The classic writing advice flung at the feet of the novices is the catchy “Write what you know” dictum. Those four words have generated more discussion and frustration than possibly any other piece of advice ever proffered. I don’t have to wade through all that again, not here, it’s been said so many times, so may places, and by so many people, it’s like the water table in low-lying lands, dig just a little and it’ll come pouring out to fill the hole. Its merits or lack thereof I will thus leave to others to continue discussing.

So what I propose to do here, instead, is a series of articles illustrated by things that I myself “know”, the lessons I’ve taken from events in my own life… and see where that takes us.

There are many different kinds of writers and they gravitate by instinct to different kinds of story. There are writers who find it easier and more organic to approach stories as being plot-driven, as a series of events leading from a causative effect to a given conclusion, with the journey between these two points clearly signposted by plot developments, with Things That Need To Happen Now for the story to move forward. I suspect these writers are the kind who find it easier to write outlines and synopses than I do – because I’m the OTHER kind of writer, for me the story is what happens to the characters, the thing that makes the characters change. The drama of the story – the laughter and the tears, the joy and the tragedy, the triumph and the failure – is not the basic building block. The thing that drives me is how my charaacters respond to a stimulus of a given kind, and it doesn’t matter precisely what kind of triumph and disaster befalls them so long as it’s the KIND of thing that will make htem change in a given way. I am an emotional writer, not necessarily a “logical” one in the sense that all my ducks have to be in a row before my story can be written – I write to seek an emotional truth, and often the road I take to my destination can be a surprising one.

Books and movies often come with the disclaimer that the story is wholly fictional and that the characters resemble no people living or dead – which is of course almost impossible to achieve because every character that a writer sketches on a page is to some extent based on people that (s)he knows. Write what you know – here is where that comes in.

Let me tell you a story now, and see if you too will “know” the emotion behind it.

When I was about sixteen years old, I was living in South Africa, studying towards my A-Level examinations (those, for my American readers, are what come after O-levels, the school-leaving examination; it is the A-levels that take you on to University, though, that final extra step between school and college). Because the only school that offered the A-levels – a British qualification and not a South African educational system requirement as such – was a boys’ school, they only admitted a select small number of girls into this post-matriculation senior class. Therewere, I believe, seven of us, all sixteen or so, and believe me, you don’t know what paranoia is until you walk down the halls of a school filled with pre-pubescent boys whose whispered conversations abruptly cease as you come within hearing range and who then follow you with carefully schooled expressions until you turn a corner and move out of sight at which point you hear the sussurus of the conversation begin again… but I digress. My point is that of the seven of us, four were from out of town, and needed boarding facilities. It was obviously not feasible to carve out a boarding environment for four sixteen-year-old females in a school packed with young males – there would have been a riot. So we boarded at a nearby girls’ school, not precisely a part of that school in the sense that we didn’t actually attend it but quartered there in a special wing, with our own little rooms in an eyrie in a wing that took up an entire side of the main entrance quad, and accessed from it; another side of said quad housed the administrative staff and their quarters, including the Headmaster’s office (bear with me, this becomes important background info in a minute). The quad itself was a beautiful little garden, with pathways surrounding a central grassy square which housed a bed of fragrant roses, and the quad was redolent with their scent in the summer.

During the year that I was there, one of the other four A-level candidates and mydorm-mate and next-door-neighbour in our little senior wing was a Greek girl who had ripened early in the manner of Mediterranean womanhood. At sixteen, this girl – let’s call her S – had all the curves of a grown woman twice her age, with rounded hips and an eye-popping bust which was an all too frequent subject of those falling-silent conversations between the younger boys at our OTHER school. She was pretty, but not stunning, not a head-turner in a goddess-come-to-life kind of way.

When S announced the imminent visit of a cousin, the rest of us in the boarders’ wing expected something much like her.

What we got, instead, was Apollo.

The cousin in question turned out to be a young man, some 19 years of age, tall and with the kind of muscular athletic build that was the perfect frame to set off the bad-boy black motorcycle leather jacket that he wore… to go with the motocycle on which he roared into the parking lot while we all hung out of the windows to watch his arrival. When he took off his helmet and shook out those golden curls, we were all lost, and S introduced him to us with a proprietorial air, with her arm linked in his. He had an easy smile and huge blue eyes to match that vivid spun-gold hair – and dammit all, he was a NICE bad boy, to boot. He was pleasant, he flirted with all of us and smiled at all of us and had a way with us that made it easy to relax and not turn into a gaggle of giggly schoolgirls fawning on him with tongue tied adoration. He was, not to mince words, flat-out gorgeous, inside and out.

When the girls school where we boarded announced their annual summer dance that year, something gave me the courage – and, having somehow (I don’t even remember how) come into possession of D’s phone number, I called him from the public phone in the main hallway of the school, with practically no privacy and blushing scarlet and glad he wasn’t there to actually see me do this, and asked him if he would like to come as my date. He accepted. I subsequently had to deal with a week’s worth of sulks from S, my dorm-mate, who had planned on asking him herself but just happened to be a little slower off the mark.

The night of the dance was a perfect balmy summer evening, the sky full of stars, the roses in the school’s entrance quad lending their own scent of enchantment to the occasion. D turned up on time and stripped off his leather jacket to change into a jacket and tie. He was a perfect escort. He danced, and danced well, which was by no means a given when it came to gangly adolescent boys – and in point of fact he stood out from the rest of the pimply boyfriends paraded around by the fact that he wasn’t a gangly adolescent boy any more, he was an enchantingly poised young man with more charm than seemed fair for a single person to possess. In between dances he made sure I was supplied with whatever drinks were on offer. He excused himself once to dance with his cousin, which was only polite, and which served to mollify S somewhat to the point that she could go on and enjoy the rest of the evening.
It was a magic night.

The dance was nearly thirty years ago, and details of the evening have long vanished from my mind – but I do remember, vividly, the finale.

The boarding school’s curfew was usually midnight but because of the dance this had been extended by special dispensation until 2AM. Sometime around half past twelve D and I began to drift back from the hall where the dance was held towards the main quad and its atmosphere of attar-of-roses; we were in no hurry to go anywhere or to say good night, we were deep in conversation, and when we reached the quad we stood there on the pathway and talked some more. The Headmaster, apparently working very late that night, emerged from the administrative wing as we stood chatting in the quad and passed us with a nod and a fairly loaded “Good night”; we said, “Good night, sir”, and watched him round the corner of the quad and move out of sight.

We were still there when the Headmaster came back, about an hour later.

I remember this scene because it seemed to me that I had somehow slipped out of my own body, and I was watching the events from across the sleeping roses. There I stood, leaning with my back against a red brick pillar, my hands folded between me and the warm brick and one foot resting lightly against the pillar base tucked behind the other. There D stood, leaning in over me slightly, one of his hands in his pocket and the other leaning flat-palmed against the pillar right next to my shoulder. We were smiling at one another. The Headmaster came round the same corner which he’d vanished behind earlier, saw us, did a beautiful double-take, glanced at his watch, raised his eyebrows. But it was still not quite the witching hour of two o’clock and he had not even caught us holding hands let alone anything beyond that. But although he said nothing the set of his shoulders and the slight frown on his face spoke volumes – “It is time this ended.”

He vanished, again, and I found that I had dropped my eyes and could not, for the life of me, lift them again to D’s face. Somehow all the easy familiarity of the moment had fled, transmuted into a vivid tension that left a coppery taste of what was almost fear in the back of my throat. Up until this moment, I had not thought beyond what would happen next, how this evening would end. Now, I could think of nothing else. And it came, his hand, just as I was expecting it to, landing gently on my cheek, cupping my chin, lifting my fact until I had to look at him again. His blue eyes were laughing, but in a good way, in such a good way.

“I suppose he’s right,” D said. “Good night. Thank you for a lovely evening.”

And he kissed me.

I honesly don’t remember if that was my first kiss or not – if anything had come before that, it was obviously not memorable enough to stick in my mind.

But perhaps what made this one stay with me for so long was not this night itself, magic though it had been, but what came after.

About a week after the dance S came stumbling into my room, her usually warm ivory skin bleached white with shock. She blurted the news – D had been riding his motorcycle when he was hit from behind by a learner driver who accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and slammed into him with sufficient force to skid the bike sideways and send him flying forward across the handlebars… straight into the path of another car coming from the opposite direction. They took him to the hospital, a broken doll with multiple fractures and a slew of internal injuries. All of this, they fixed with a series of eye-wateringly long and complex surgeries.

S relayed the developing news as it happened – the surgeries, the aftermath, the recovery at home. But she did not tell me that there was one thing they did not fix, they did not know how to fix.

I phoned, after he was home, to speak to him, to wish him well. I spoke to someone friendly, polite… but with no memory of who I was, or, not too long into the phone conversation, of who he had started talking to at all. His mother took the phone and told me that he had suffered profound psychological consequences as well as the physical trauma of the accident. He had simply ceased to be able to hold any long-term memories at all.

He was nineteen years old. He had been gorgeous, bright, kind, with a life full of promise stretching into the future… and now the future was gone.

I never saw him again. I don’t know what became of him. I had no time to fall in love, not really, but I might have done, if given a chance – and I still remember him with a quiet happiness. But I also think of him whenever some senseless tragedy falls into my path. For thirty years I have carried the memory and the presence of a boy who had had my name, my face, my very existence erased from his mind.

Write what you know. This is part of my emotional truth, the taste of the bitter with the sweet, the sense that the world is wonderful and unfair all at once, that viciously bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it. When I write characters who love, or cling to a fading faith, or yearn, or are struck with a sudden paralysing shyness in the face of a magic moment – it is this that I come back to, this scene in the album of the pictures of my life.

Love, and loss. And life. As always was, as always will be. You know this.Writing what you know doesn’t mean taking a scene or a character or a sequence of events or a setting absolutely verbatim from the fabric of your own existence. If we all did that, then we would have but one story to tell – our own, and nothing else would matter or could impinge on that. But our stories are never just ours. We touch so many other lives, so many other stories – and every one of those touches us back. All of this, we know. And can write about.

Here endeth the first lesson. Go you, now, and write.

Scenes must move.  For your main characters, each scene or chapter should be a sheer slope or a plunging ravine in their emotional rollercoaster.  Positive to negative for one scene, reverse the polarity in the next.

Let’s demonstrate with Sir Norman the Norman, bastard-sword-wielding knight of medieval Northern French persuasion.

Scene 1 – This is Norman’s first adventure, thus he is terrified (-) about storming the forbidding citadel and rescuing the beautiful princess, Sofia (who he has never met but has heard lots of wonderful things about).  He manages to slay the foul-fragranced-Flemish-foot soldiers at the back door and enter the fortress undetected.  Thus he feels quite bolstered by his success so far (+).

Scene 2 -  More confident now, Norman stalks, stealthy and determined ( + ), through the citadel, intent of finding and freeing Sofia.  But then he overhears two guards discussing the latest news from the war.  Norman’s home village has been decimated and all of his family and friends are dead.  Norman is left distraught at the news ( - ).

Scene 3 -  Rocked by the loss of everything he holds dear, Norman becomes disillusioned with his mission ( - ).  Princess Sofia will supposedly restore peace, but what if there is nothing to restore peace too?  Grieving and confused, he fails to notice the Flemish crossbowman before it’s too late.  Twang, thwack.  With a bolt sticking out of his side, things look bad for Norman ( - x2).

Note:  We can go from negative to negative, or positive to positive, as long as it’s a significant change.

Scene 4 – With the baddies closing in to finish the job, Norman is hurting, emotionally and physically ( - ), but he catches sight of Sofia on the balcony, and she is more beautiful than he could ever have imagined.  He knows, in that moment, that she can stop the war and save his nation from destruction.  Inspired ( + ), he wrenches the bolt from his side (it’s just a flesh wound after all), kills some more Flemish soldiers, and rushes to rescue his people’s saviour.

Scene 5 – Norman rescues his fair princess and they kiss ( + ).  It’s love at first sight for these crazy kids.  Norman’s passion drives him as he fight his way out of the castle.  He and Sofia ride off into the forest and make sweet sweet love in a romantically lit glade (+ x lots).  All is well until a passing deranged cleric points out that the fair princess is in fact Norman’s sister.  Norman never knew he was a prince…and…he’s just…(- x lots more)

Scene 6 – In true heroic fashion, Norman murders the cleric, who, it turns out, is the only person who knows that Norman is a prince.  Norman is much relieved ( + ).  He and his princess-sister get married and rule the kingdom, happily ever after ( + x infinity, if you like that sort of thing).

There we have it.  A protagonist’s emotional state should be up and down like the Assyrian Empire.  If you have a scene where your character feels exactly the same at the end of the scene as they did at the beginning, with no peak or trough in the middle, chances are it’s just exposition.  Change it or delete it. 

This is an exta post-between-posts to honor a courageous lady and her book. A lot of folks are involved in this effort…all on this particular day…and we at Storytellers Unplugged would be remiss if we didn’t do what we could to join in… so, below is a short snippet and a link. I urge you to follow it, and to show your support in whatever way you can. If you feel the urge to read a book…maybe this is the one — today, anyway. The rest of her supporters celebrated on Monday, but better late than never, huh?

— David Niall Wilson for The Authors of Storytellers Unplugged

 

“Today, over 300 bloggers, including bestsellers, Emmy winners, movie makers, and publishing houses have come together to talk about THE LIAR’S DIARY by Patry Francis. Why? To give the book the attention it deserves on its release day while Patry takes the time she needs to heal from cancer.”

I’ve been reading in some odd corners of American history lately, specifically Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart (originally published in 1936) and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (originally published in 1974).

Now, the disaster that befell the Donner Party in 1846-7 and the witch hunts of Salem Village in 1692 don’t, on the surface, have a great deal to do with each other, aside from being dark and morbid moments in American history. Except for one very odd thing, which these two books are, in their quite different ways, failing to engage with.

Many of the principal actors are children.

The Salem witch hunts begin, of course, with a group of teenage girls, and of the eighty-seven people trapped in the Sierra Nevada by the snows of 1846, forty-two of them were under eighteen. I started to talk about this in a mini-post I did for Jeff VanderMeer, about who gets to be a “hero” and why. History is written by the victors; as feminist scholars have been saying for years, it is also written by those who can write. And perhaps even more crucially, those who have the resources of money and leisure time to be able to study. Novelists merely need time to write. (And oh the irony of that “merely.” I laugh.) Historians need time to research–which also possibly involves travel, itself expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, to write novels, to write stories, does not require more than average education. (Or what we, in 2008, have the luxury of considering “average education.”) But to write history that will be read and respected and will shape the narratives of historians to come, a person needs training, and a lot of it. These days, that training is widely available to lower class people, to people of color, to women. But there’s still one group to whom it is, always and inevitably, denied: children.

Any child can grow up to be a historian. But, as writers like James Barrie and C. S. Lewis have pointed out with varying degrees of dismay, in order to grow up, one must cease to be a child. And childhood experience is only dubiously recoverable to the adult mind. Even with the best and sincerest good will, we can only remember what it was like.

And these historians, Stewart and Boyer and Nissenbaum, are for various reasons, not interested in the experience of children. Stewart is interested (as I wrote for Jeff) in the heroism of action; he barely sees the children at all. Boyer and Nissenbaum are interested in the social and economic webs and fractures that caused the witch hunts to target certain individuals rather than others and that, arguably, caused those witch hunts to grow like a wild fire. They are deeply interested in the social lives of their subjects, both men and women, but by the very nature of how they understand “social lives,” the children, despite being the instigators and the focus of the trials, are just not relevant. They talk at length, for instance, about the disappointments, betrayals, and resentments that would cause Thomas Putnam Jr. and his wife Ann to victimize women of a particular age and economic position, but insofar as they discuss the motivations of Thomas and Ann’s daughter (also Ann), they assume that her reasons must be copies of her parents’ reasons.

And I think that is a false assumption.

We can’t recover Ann Putnam’s reasons, any more than we can know how the children of the Donner Party represented their experiences to themselves (although I find it eerie and profoundly disturbing how easy it is to map their experience onto fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel”). But we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to recognize that that absence is itself a presence in the stories we tell ourselves, the explanations we create.

We are all missing a piece of the puzzle.

by Wayne Allen Sallee

Ah, Huey Lewis, the man too hip to be square. Wonder what’s he’s doing right now? (Aside from slapping at his ear, buzzing away because he’s being talked about). I’ve spent the week reading Brian Hodge’s MAD DOGS and had thought about writing about Brian’s move into the realm of crime fiction, and how, just like the guy he co-dedicates the book to, Sean Doolittle, each book is about a different topic, different characters, no super cop who is the first guy on the scene for every high profile crime. (Incidentally, the other fellow in the dedication is Clark Perry, and fourteen years ago, it was the four of us in staring across the Mississippi at Algiers, Louisiana like we were The Warriors ready for their last rumble; it was then that Clark gave me the name that shall live on past my own, Jonny Algiers. Certainly better than Waynard Thumptwanger, after an obscure freaking puppet on a local kids show here (he was Maynard, though). Just saying, its a small world, even when I realize I haven’t seen Brian since last century. But, man, it takes balls to write the stuff Brian’s writing, same with Sean, not doing the safe bit and creating a lovable character and a crusty but cantankerous boss who will appear in book after book after book. Now, I’ve gone on record in several interviews saying that DEATHGRIP is the only book that made me truly consider suicide. Of course, that was before my lovely and expensive bipolar meds, which keep me perfectly sane for five days and then for two days the “S” word is floating beneath my eyelids when I blink. I’m thinking if I reread DEATHGRIP during those next two days, well, who knows what might happen. Brian breaks from the dismal view of life I am poster child for, and writes WILD HORSES and now this crazy book I’ve told him reads like a BLOOD SIMPLE episode of MY NAME IS EARL. Would it be so goddamn hard for the masses of people out there who read diluted crap with Fabio as a vampire on the cover to just realize that any book that Brian writes is brilliant, it doesn’t have to be horror. Sean has always gone the crime route, but I’ll bet a lot of you don’t recognize the name. Same for my good pal and sometimes co-writer, Sidney Williams, who has nine novels in print. Well, I went off on a tangent, as usual. I want to discuss something else, if it hasn’t already been covered (seeing as someone was asking for a certain Seattle publisher’s email). Also, while I’m not naming names, I’ve left a clue in the fact that I have Brian’s limited edition book because, well…

I’ve emailed a few people over the past few months, Dave has put me in touch with James Lowder, who has quite a bit of knowledge regarding anthology contracts, and I think what it really comes down to is…no one expected a search engine like Google. Certainly not editors. Who’d have thought SPLATTERPUNKS was released in Italy? It was Mr. Lowder who mentioned, after I told him that I traded with a private collector in the Netherlands to get three Danish editions of YEAR’S BEST HORROR, that it was quite possible that there would be very little monies to be had as the selling rights might have been very minimal. To this, I agree. There have been only two editors who have ever been square with me, Ellen Datlow and Gordon Van Gelder. I’m not talking about royalties, and I’m also talking of the days when we mailed people or called them up. Ellen made certain I received every foreign edition of LITTLE DEATHS and Gordon sent me a variant cover of SPLATTERPUNKS third printing and the Spanish edition of NIGHTMARES ON ELM STREET. Nobody else has done Philip K. Dick about such things, and those I’ve mentioned it to claim it all falls back on their agents. Or not knowing how to get in touch, even though everyone knows everyone now thanks to the Internet. Or Google. Hell, it frosts my crab rangoons that I can type my name in Google Images and find that damn Italian copy of SPLATTERPUNKS staring at me on page 2. If Huey Lewis’s ears are ringing, I can only hope that —- —–’s urethra is turning itself into a balloon animal. Never mind the German edition of both volumes. I don’t give a damn about money, I would just like the common decency of being told that there was a foreign edition of an anthology I am in and where to contact the publisher. No word on that when LOVE IN VEIN was picked up by Michel St. Aubin, or several other anthologies with French and German publishers. To his credit, the late J. N. Williamson did tell everyone that MASQUES III was being reprinted in Spain and did give us an address in Madrid. Of course, I don’t have any of my contracts from the mid 90s around anymore, so I can’t say that First North American Rights meant anything as I had expected. Screw the story on the agent not following through, the editor knows what’s what when they get their cut, however big or small it might be. The same goes for domestic editions, I’ll go on record as saying that I am tired of finding trades published by ROC with the hardback publisher not saying a damn thing. And, no, its not like DAW trying to keep up with a hundred authors from the YBH anthos, the ROC books were by dealers of limited editions, you recall me mentioning *ahem* Brian’s book earlier, right?

I’m working on this comic for Elfinkids in New Delhi and I’ve basically signed off on everything, whatever I create belongs to them. Taking what they’re giving, because the money is better than I’d ever expected. I knew this going in, but I did ask that they change my contract to show that I get compensated with copies of any collection (the comics are 64 pg quarterlies) or foreign editions. Sure, I’m gambling that this thing won’t take off and become Bollywood’s answer to Shark-Boy and Lava-Girl, but at least I’ve learned to get answers to the questions that matter. So I’ve filled out my private bookshelf a little thanks to Google and a guy named Kees Buis and no thanks to —- —-, —– ——-, and particularly balloon animal urethra ————-!#@#$#@#—— . And, hey, thanks to Google I found out there’s another guy with my name who owns a fish store in southern Florida. As always, thanks for putting up with my insanity.

–Wayne

It doesn’t stop.

Contrary to popular belief, fond hope, and fairy tale, the world does not in fact stop whenever you reach a major milestone in your life and/or writing. No matter how momentous the occasion, no matter how important it is to you, it is not an ending. There is no happily ever after, the credits do not roll, and most importantly, you are not excused from continuing on. 

Which ain’t a bad thing, nosirreebob. But it’s not what we’re necessarily led to expect by the romantic myth of the writer.

Case in point: Me. This month, I had the unmitigated pleasure of seeing my first original novel, Firefly Rain, hit the shelves. Physically, it’s a gorgeous book, one that I was more than happy to pogo around my office showing off because it looked so damn cool. In the company of my lovely wife, I did all the things you’d expect a giddy new author to do – throw a party, wander from bookstore to bookstore doing surreptitious faceouts, holding copies of the book prominently and loudly proclaiming “Gosh, what an amazing book!”*. You get the idea.

And when we’d had a day or two of fun doing that, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof, I went right back to trying to administer the coup de grace to the next project I was working on, one that took me slightly over two years from inception to draft completion. Why had it taken so long? Lots of reasons, really. Part of it was the difficulty of the material and my closeness to it. Part of it was the demands of the day job, which did in fact conspire to chew up many of my evenings and weekends with carnivorous deadlines and abrupt travel catastrophes. Much of it was a series of fits and false starts as I tried to find the right voice and the right tone.

But a little bit of it was shaking the feeling – completely unfounded – that until I got “closure” on the first book, I wouldn’t be ready to write the next one. This is a dangerous and fallacious thought to carry around in your noggin for many reasons, not the least of which is that writing is not a serial process. It’s parallel. The time between when you finish a book and when it hits the shelf can extensive, so if you wait until one comes out to finish (or, God help you, start) on the next one, you’re just vastly increasing the time that will elapse between your books.

Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math. I finished the first draft of Firefly Rain back when John Kerry still had a lead in the polls. A polished draft was done by April of 2005. If, at that point, I had been able to compartmentalize and say “That one’s done, on to the next”, and if the next one had taken exactly as long as it did in real life, it still would have been done last spring. Instead, I finally wrapped it up this week, meaning that close to a year’s worth of time has been spent, more than a year’s worth of momentum has been frittered away.

Or, to put it another way, I’m already a year behind on the next one.

Fortunately, I’ve learned. The next next one, such as it is, is already in progress. I finished the manuscript Monday, went to bed early on Tuesday, and started in on the next round Wednesday.

Is the manuscript perfect and polished and done? No. At this point, it’s chainsaw sculpture – the shape is there, but there’s plenty of work to be done with sandpaper and polish. But I’m not waiting, not waiting for the folks who are looking it over get back to me, not waiting until I’ve made it perfect and sparkly with the literary equivalent of a cherry on top before digging in on the next generation of projects. Instead, I’m compartmentalizing, and I’m moving forward on the next project (and laying the groundwork for the one after that) while this one gets tended to, and then when it’s ready for me to go back in with the dremel instead of the chainsaw, I’ll do that instead.

Because, after all, it never stops, and now I know it.

 

 

 

 

 

*Not as such. Honest.

By Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem

Janet is buried hip deep in a deadline that she’s having trouble with thanks to the wonders of doctors deciding to “adjust” medication levels that were working. So, she asked her long-time friends Melanie and Steve Tem to fill in this month. In March, Wizards of the Coast Discoveries will be releasing the novel-length reimagining of their multi-award-winning novella “The Man On The Ceiling.” Publisher’s Weekly has already praised as “This visceral, psychological view of the horrors that occur in an average person’s life will draw in readers with delicate, exquisitely detailed and almost hypnotic language.” In honor of that, Steve and Melanie offer a back-and-forth on why writers write what they write, whatever you want to call it.

-=-=-=-=-

Steve: I remember that very early on I had this idea that it was an important part of the writer’s mission to give testimony, to say ‘This is the way it was for me during my time on the planet.’ But how do you do that as a fiction writer? Your job isn’t to write speeches, or to preach. And how do you risk embarrassing yourself? I know when I started out I wanted to be at least a little cool, to present an air of professionalism, to show that I was in control of my materials.

Melanie: It seems to me that often, in writing as in “real life,” giving testimony or bearing witness is all we can do–giving testimony to “here’s what it’s like for me right here and right now,” and bearing witness to what it’s like for other people as we imagine it and embody it through our characters and plots and through our willingness to take in other people’s stories.

And that’s no small thing.

Steve: That is no small thing, but it seems to me there are many forces which seduce us away from this basic mission. When you’re starting out, you want to sell stories, you want to build your resume, so you study the markets and you attempt to write what editor A appears to be buying. Or maybe you respond to a theme anthology invitation even though you don’t feel particularly driven to write on that theme. Nothing wrong with either of those approaches, but if you take that road enough times I think you forget there are other roads you can take.

If I may stretch the metaphor, I think writing about what really compels you is often an “off road” approach. You don’t have a particular market in mind, and the weight of emotion that often comes with this kind of writing often means that finding the right characters and structure to carry that weight becomes a difficult technical task. Sometimes it’s like relearning how to write with each new story.

 Melanie: At the same time, though, I often enjoy writing to “prompts”–which, in the case of markets, can be theme anthologies or market guidelines. For me, there are so many stories to be told that sometimes it’s a matter of sort of letting the line, with a creative magnet on the end of it, down into the teeming mass of possible stories and seeing what sticks to it.

Which is definitely a stretched simile.

Steve: That’s a good point. Sometimes, rather than trying to “say” something, you get better results by setting up an intriguing situation–a “prompt” or god-forbid a “market requirement”–and then see what comes out of that writing process. Better writers than I have suggested that “if you want to communicate, use a telephone,” the idea being that if you set up your situation properly, it will trigger all that stuff in the back of your mind, the stuff that really obsesses you, and that will come out on the page.

One of the things that was scariest, and most exciting, about working on the new “novel” version of The Man On The Ceiling was that some chapters just started out as writing prompts–”Naming Names” or “A Sense of Place” or something weird like “Reality Puddles.” One of us would start writing, and all this material would come pouring out–memories, dreams, reflections–things that were really essential to us, coming out onto the page and (with judicious editing of course) finding a structure.

Melanie: TMOC was quite a ride! I found myself dredging up all sorts of “prompts.” “Reality puddles” was a phrase given to me many years ago by a schizophrenic teen who preferred to honor and explore the unique perspective rather than medicating it; in the midst of all the crazy imagery, this young adventurer told me, “every once in a while reality puddles, and I can rest.” That stayed with me.

“Asymptote,” “Hitting the Quarter Mark,” “A Sense of Place”–all those phrases, chapter headings in TMOC, were things someone said to me or I picked up in conversation and stored away in my subconscious. Later, when I needed them–when I sort of sent out the message to my subconscious–there they were, like found objects.

You better be careful what you say to a writer….

Steve: So it’s an exploration, not just into your own passions and the realities you observe, but into the invisible worlds behind those realities, into imagination and into deep metaphor, worlds which inform what you feel and the realities you observe. You go there, and you report back. You testify. For me, this is what fantasy writing is all about.

This kind of testimony concerning “what it was like” has been traditionally, I believe, reserved for “serious” writers writing in the realistic tradition. The likes of Charles Dickens, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Dos Passos, Frank Norris, Don DeLillo–wildly different in their approaches, certainly, but all seeming to report on the events and the psychology of their times. Reporters and witnesses. Fantasy writers are almost invariably excluded. Critics and readers generally don’t expect fantasy to provide information as to what it was like. They tend to expect fantasy to report on “this is where we escaped to.” And of course a lot of fantasy writers buy into this. Readers/the critics/the writers tend to see fantasy as something separate from the writings that provide us with testimony. They see fantasy in terms of entertainment values alone.

I like to think that fantasy can do both. I think that even as a young reader I thought of fantasy in terms of testimony, providing information about what couldn’t be seen, what couldn’t be touched, and yet which had a very real and concrete affect on my life.

Melanie: My goal is to accept as few labels as I can get away with. I eschew those personality tests, for instance, like Meyers-Briggs, that make me choose which I would rather do, go to a party or take a walk alone in the mountains, and won’t let me give my real choice, which is “both.” I think the “types” that are said to come out of those inventories are reductionist. We should be striving for greater diversity, broader experience, deeper truth–not trying to make things simple.

So I have trouble with labels like “fantasy,” “horror,” “serious literature.” All of the above, I say–and more!

 

 

By Stan Ridgley

Words are the stuff of power.

Anyone who works with words for a living knows their power.

Well, let me issue a caveat. Anyone who works with words ought to know their power.

But of course, ensembles of words in various stages of undress are not necessarily created equal.

Pause

You choked on that for a moment, didn’t you? Maybe reread it to give it a chance, and then rightfully scoffed. It has a sort of squinty-eyed surface profundity that dissipates within seconds. Hot air. Such is the power of words, a power that is amorphous, deceptive, difficult to master, if it is at all possible to master.

One man who understands words and their majesty and their subtlety, certainly far more than do I, is our own Rick Steinberg.

Rick’s work is tremendous. To steal a line from Leonard Bishop, his sentences “stink with power.” Sometimes raw, sometimes untamed, always alluring, never dull – Rick’s graces us with his fine-edged scalpel each month, and the emotions cascade from the screen.

It is a beautiful thing to be moved by words. And it is a high compliment, indeed, to hear such praise. I never do. Rick hears it often, I am certain. Rick creates moving passages, assemblages of words describing scenes in such a high-toned style that I could never attain.

And so I learn. I learn from all of my compatriots here at Storytellers.

I fervently believe that it is necessary to respect words and their function. To understand the visceral strength in well-structured phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that hang together seamlessly in such a tight formation that a reader cannot imagine them written in any other way.

While teaching writing is not my primary function, I do provide fundamental instruction of a Strunk and White nature so as to raise the bar to an acceptable level. Before you eye-roll at me for such a rudimentary approach, let me assure you that today’s undergraduate students desperately need the salving coolness of William Strunk and E.B. White. If only for clarity, concision, and pith.

And for the pleasure of the book, for it is a minor joy to read. And to reread.

Many young people – not all, but enough to take note of – want to be creative and innovative, to think outside of that box we always hear about. I note that they must first understand the box and what it contains before they might profitably “think outside” of it. Because likely what they consider fresh and new and sparkling has been done before.

They must understand how words fit together to convey ideas, notions, fact and fiction. They must understand the communicative function of words as well as their evocative power. They must recognize tendentiousness masquerading as neutrality, entire social, political, cultural arguments embodied in single phrases – sometimes single words. They must recognize sloganeering in their own writing and arguments or face being caught short when challenged on their own lack of depth or understanding.

Example?

At the risk of agitation, or perhaps guaranteeing it, let me take a detour into the realm of the classroom, where words that characterize well-hashed issues can come freighted with all kinds of baggage.

Certain phrases can embody entire arguments.

“Widening gap between rich and poor” has become a kneejerk pejorative. Regrettably used more frequently by young people these days, supposedly identifying a “problem” that must be corrected, and never pausing in their feverish idealism to recognize that the gap between rich and poor is always getting wider, regardless of whether an economy is strong or weak.

The proper question to ask, I think, is “is everyone getting richer and better off than before in a dynamic and thriving economy?” or is the situation one in which the poor are getting poorer with no chance or even hope of improvement? These are two quite different situations, conflated by the slogan “widening gap between rich and poor” trope.

Single words sometimes embody entire arguments, relieving the user of the burden to make the point of the begged question – in my own bailiwick, “sweatshop” is one such politically and socially freighted word. As in the “debate over sweatshops.” In my classes on Globalization this “debate” is addressed forthrightly.

But in its proper terms and in its proper context.

I must tell you that the preening certitude of a young person posturing against “sweatshops” is a sight to behold. No gray area, no moral conundrums, as clear-cut an issue as anyone could imagine that puts one on the side of the angels, because who other than an evil exploiter could possibly take stand for “sweatshops?”

A part of me envies that kind of hard-boned simplicity borne of shallow naivete.

Hand in hand with “sweatshops” is usually a mention of something called “cultural imperialism,” which is merely a pejorative reaction against the introduction of goods and services and ideas into modernizing societies. Such “cultural imperialism” involves an attack on the “traditional way of life” and local culture. In my lectures to Russian students in Izhevsk and in Ufa, Bashkortostan, I meet this kind of attitude quite frequently, as if someone is compelling locals to drink Coca-Cola, smoke Marlboros, wear Italian shoes, or dine at Chinese restaurants.

The call for preserving “traditional” ways of life smacks of condescension of the worst type – it is, for example, an attitude that suggests that locking subsistence farmers in their pristine “traditional” circumstances as delightful subjects for picture postcards from exotic places is a positive.

Some students are angry and somewhat confused when it is noted that all that is being offered is a choice – to work as one’s ancestors did, ankle-deep in dung-filled water of rice paddies, or to work in a new factory, earning more money in one day than the traditional villager might ever seen in a year.

A choice, that’s all. An alternative. “Exploitation.”

Some people, professional activists among them, just don’t like the choice being offered, even as earlier there was no choice, no chance for improvement.

And rather than offer their own range of additional choices, they harass those companies that provide economic opportunity, a chance for a better life. The chance for newly empowered local workers to earn beyond subsistence wages, to then spend money at the kiosks that quickly spring up courtesy of entrepreneurs who instinctively know how the market works. The chance to utilize the new roads built by the foreign company as part of infrastructure improvement.

And so, in my classes, I refer to Nike and other firms that manufacture abroad as establishing Economic Opportunity Centers throughout the developing world, enlarging the range of economic choices open to local workers.

Some students express a kind of confused wonderment that local factories contracted by Nike (Nike does not own them) could in any sense of the phrase be called Economic Opportunity Centers. But, in fact, that phrase is more accurately descriptive as to what is actually happening when it is compared in many cases to a subsistence farming economy that it augments. Nonetheless, the point made, we shift to compromise language of a more neutral cast – Nike and many other companies that contract manufacturing with local producers are engaged in Economic Activity Abroad.

Whether that activity is in some abstract sense “good” or “bad” depends upon whom you ask – an activist sitting in an air conditioned Washington office, hands steepled, giving an interview to National Public Radio on the evils of Globalization . . . or a young foreign worker, who now has a choice and a chance to work indoors, to earn more money than before, to better his lot and that of his family.

A choice that earlier was not available.

If we then proceed from less politically charged (or at least less tendentious) premises, we can then begin to understand the actual dynamics at work, building from the ground-up. Usually, at the end of the discussion – which is usually vigorous give and take among my students—there emerges an understanding that economic activity abroad in the form of contract manufacturing has both positive and negative aspects.

Now, I have dipped into the hot, turbid political waters of Globalization only because that happens to be the topic at hand for me now, daily. And I have roamed a bit in this essay, but the theme that runs through this essay, I think, is the power of words – to persuade, to deceive, to communicate, to obfuscate.

Regardless of one’s opinion of the issues I surfaced here to illustrate the theme, I believe that those in this forum recognize more-so than most this incredible power of the medium in which they work. And whatever conclusions my students arrive at with regard to the debates at hand, they will have at least been exposed to the power of expression and the subtlety of language.

Words are the stuff of power.

by Alex

PART ONE - THE JOB

Let me be clear about this up front. Right now is NOT the time to be sending your scripts to Hollywood in hope of breaking in to screenwriting. As I posted about here, the Writers Guild is on strike and anyone who tries to scab will be blackballed from working guild-covered jobs for life. DON’T DO IT.

That said, I know a lot of you have thoughts about screenwriting, and may not know that the time right AFTER a strike is historically one of the best times to sell a script, and at the best possible price. It may be counterintuitive, because you would think (and you’d be right ) that a lot of professional screenwriters would be writing their own original scripts during the strike and there would be a glut of original screenplays being submitted. But actually that has tended to drive the market for spec scripts up.

So I thought I’d take my next few posts to talk about screenwriting, the business and the craft.
First, a brief background (and of course you can read more in depth at my website.). Before I sold THE HARROWING, I worked steadily as a screenwriter for ten years. I had a pretty typical screenwriting career, actually – I worked for every major studio (except Universal, for some reason) and some independent production companies, I sold original scripts and got hired on assignment to do novel adaptations, I made a good living, and in all that time I had one movie made (depending on who you talk to, it’s estimated that 400 to 600 scripts are bought or commissioned for every one that gets made. Not good odds.) Which is the second reason I started writing novels. The first reason is that I’m passionate about my work and not only was I sick to death of having things I wrote not made – I was sick to death of having things I wrote butchered – and THEN not made. I was sick to death of seeing other people’s great scripts butchered, too, but that’s another column. I’ll try to keep this one in focus.

For the purposes of this column, I’m going to be talking primarily about feature screenwriting, although I will mention television writing as well. (And I’m talking specifically about Hollywood feature screenwriting, not independent feature screenwriting, which is a completely different animal.) Feature writing and television writing are structured very differently, but what I want to point out right up front is that in television, writers have the power (not at first, but once you get into the higher ranks). In features, directors have the power and writers most assuredly do not.

We’ll get back to that, though.

I’ll start with the first thing you need to know about screenwriting, and the biggest misconceptions I find people have about it.

IT’S A JOB.

Authors – and aspiring screenwriters – rarely seem to know this about screen work. It’s a job in a way that writing novels just isn’t. Employers (studios, producers) are looking for writers who are committed to doing the screen thing as a living, full time (double full time, is often the real case). They don’t want to just buy your fabulous spec (meaning original script), pay you big money and never hear from you again. The chances are infinitesimal that they’ll ever make your movie at all. Your script is just a sample to show that you can write the movie THEY want to make, which they will dictate to you, and which probably won’t make a whole lot of dramatic sense, but they’re paying you to do it.

So, speaking now to authors who are thinking of toying with screenwriting - unless you’re willing to move to LA (and it has to be LA, unless you want to do independent film, which pays even less than novels!) - and really go for it, it’s probably not what you want to be doing. A lot of your time as a working screenwriter is taken up trying to GET jobs, and that in the end was the most frustrating thing to me - how much wasted time and writing was going on with nothing to show for it. Except, of course, I was making a living.

For the vast majority of novelists, it’s a much more viable idea to work on optioning your novels and getting some money from Hollywood without having to pursue a screenwriting career. On the other hand, if you’re fairly young and film or television is your passion, and you want to make a living exclusively at writing, it’s a really viable job. You can get paid for writing, you can support a family, you can work in a glamorous business with wildly talented people (and a lot of jerks, too, but truly, a lot of brilliantly talented people) and once in a while you can get something done.

Another thing novelists never seem to know about screenwriting is that screenwriters are union workers. Working screenwriters belong to the Writers Guild of America – WGA – East or West, depending on which side of the Mississippi you live on. The WGA is a federal labor union and handles collective bargaining for screen, TV, game and news writers. The WGA has negotiated, through long activism, a very good MBA, minimum basic agreement, which ensures that WGA members get paid certain minimums for their work, including pension and health benefits. That’s why screen and television writers are paid so much more than novelists, on average.

But what, you ask, is the catch?

Yes, there is a huge catch. We got the contract, and salary minimums and benefits - but in order to do that, we gave up copyright. When studios buy your script, they buy your copyright. It’s their project. And from then on, you are an employee, and you can be fired off your own script at any time, for any reason or no reason, but the reason is almost always the same – the studio/producers will want a bigger writer on the project. In fact, they will want a whole series of bigger writers on the project, the more the better, somehow – it’s not unusual for two or three dozen writers to work on a single project (although only three writers or teams of writers are ever allowed to be credited on any one movie) and that, in a nutshell, is why movies are so bad these days. And that’s another column, too.

But I’m sure you’re not here to read about collective bargaining (even though it’s kind of crucial). I’d like to say, though, that I’ve not just been a working screenwriter – I’ve also been tremendously active in the WGA, including a 2 year term on the Board of Directors, and administering a private message board for over 2000 WGA members. So when I speak in sweeping terms about what makes a screenwriting career, I’m not just speaking about how I did it, personally – I actually have had a ringside seat from which I see very specifically who does break in to the business and how they break in and how they sustain their careers.

Now, on to what you really want to know, what everyone wants to know:

HOW DO I BREAK IN?

The way you break in is: write a great script (and having a male lead doesn’t hurt), get a great film agent and have that agent market your script as a weekend read and hopefully get into a bidding war. I’ll get into more details later, but that’s the process in a nutshell. Chances are you won’t sell that script, especially because the spec market has been depressed for years (although a good time to sell a script may be on the horizon – more on that later, too).

But whether or not you sell the script, if it’s good, even if all the studios and financing companies pass (and there are only about 10 real sources of money in Hollywood at any given time), you will be flavor of the month and they will want to meet you and you will then go through a couple dozen meet-and-greet meetings in which execs and producers will tell you the projects they’re trying to get going and you can potentially get an assignment out of that - or you can work harder and go in with a pitch of your own that you might sell and be hired to write.

That is how the vast majority of screenwriters get started. That is precisely how I got started – great script (I thought!) got me great agent who sold it to Fox in a bidding war. Script never got made, but I was “in”. I got an assignment off that, and kept getting hired from there.

So, next question.

HOW DO YOU GET A FILM AGENT?

This is how I got my film agent. This is how most screenwriters I know (and I know a lot) got their film agents.

First, they lived in Los Angeles.

Second, they worked as story analysts, or readers, for a studio or agency or production company. A story analyst reads scripts and books that are submitted to companies for consideration for film or TV development, and writes “coverage” - a 2-10 page synopsis of the book or script (depending on the company’s requirements) and a one-page evaluation of the material’s potential as a film, complete with a grid that scores the script in terms of character development, story, dialogue, action, and other narrative elements.

People get those jobs by living in Los Angeles, where you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who works in the business.

I didn’t get my first job as a reader by throwing rocks at my neighbors, but I did get the job through a neighbor who was working as a reader herself and had too much work to handle. I ghosted some of her scripts, and when a reading job came up at her company she recommended me, and I got the job – it was that easy.

Working as a reader is tremendous training for screenwriting because you learn the format, you learn what works and what doesn’t, you learn how the business really operates from a writing point of view, and you learn who the agents are, out there.

When I was a reader I kept file cards on every single script that came in to my company and every single agent who submitted. So when I had my great script finished, I knew exactly which agents I wanted to approach. I made a list and cold-called those agents, and explained that I was a reader at this company and I’d read these scripts of the agent’s by these clients and I had a script that I thought that agent would respond to.

Every single one of the agents but one said to send the script. I got multiple offers of representation and picked the best one of the bunch, and he sold that script to Fox.

BUT WHAT IF I DON’T LIVE IN LOS ANGELES?

Well, as I said above, if you’re not willing to move to Los Angeles, you’re probably not going to have a career as a screenwriter. It happens, but rarely. At least in the beginning, you have to actually be there.

But – there is a tried and true way to get an agent and break into the business if you don’t live in Los Angeles. You will still have to move to Los Angeles to sustain your career, but you can take this road to break in without actually moving yet.

THE CONTESTS:

There are some established screenwriting contests and fellowships that have launched many a writing career. There are a million writing contests out there and most of them will not help you to a screenwriting career at all. But the following contests have consistently gotten the winners and placers good agents, writing assignments, or TV staff jobs:

- The Nicholl Fellowship - the most prestigious and best breakthough screenwriting contest out there. Many pros say it’s about the only contest that can lead to a professional career. http://www.oscars.org/nicholl/index.html

- The Disney Fellowship and Nickelodeon Writing Fellowship – winners get an actual job and hands-on training. The Nick Fellowship grooms writers to work on one of their shows.

- The Warner Bros Drama Writers Workshop and Comedy Writers Workshop – a fast-track way into TV staffing. You write your hour spec and submit. They get about 600 scripts a year; they pick 25 to interview, and choose 13 for the program. You write a second spec under their supervision, and they get you interviews with current CW network and studio projects. About half of any given class gets hired on staff out of the program. Being in the program can get you a good agent if you don’t have one.

- For University of California students and alumni, the Goldwyn Award is also major. There is huge industry competition for the first-place winner, and the Goldwyns heavily promote the winners. Just about every winner becomes a WGA member and is working in the industry within a year of winning.

- TVwriter.com and WriteSafe contests: I know winners of these contests who have gone on to industry jobs. TVwriter.com is also just an excellent resource and community for aspiring TV writers. The film equivalent is Wordplay - Wordplayer.com - about which more next week.

AND JUST ONE MORE NOTE ABOUT BREAKING IN…

… because even though I’ve not even scratched the surface of this subject, I think I’d better let some of this stuff absorb and pick it up again next week. But I do want to reiterate my opening points.

Again, right now you can forget about breaking in to screenwriting because the WGA is on strike. (Go here for details). If you sell a script now, you will be blacklisted from a film career for the rest of your life. Don’t do it.

But again, traditionally the few months right after the conclusion of a strike has always been the very best spec market, with the very best prices paid. So IF the pattern holds, if you can write yourself a spec script and plan to take it out right after the strike you are in a really good position to sell/break in. (See, I told you collective bargaining was important!).

I hope some of this has been helpful. Please feel free to deluge me with questions, and I’ll answer them where I can, and I hope our other screenwriters out there will jump in with their experiences as well.

Next time I’ll also talk about the craft of screenwriting.

Alexandra Sokoloff