You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. ~Arthur Polotnik
Tag Archives: writer
Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Goethe
I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard
Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
~William Safire, “Great Rules of Writing”
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath
Writing is good. Getting someone to read it is better.
Writing a script is the easy part. The trick is getting someone to produce it. Something like 80,000 scripts are written annually in America and only a few hundred of those get made into films, and only a select portion of those get shown in theaters.
Really makes you wonder how things like that Chipmunks movie ever get made. It breaks my heart a little bit.
Before anyone can sell a script, they have to get it read. The best way I know to get a script read by people who can actually do something with it (aside from having an amazing network, of course) is through e-query delivery services.
ScriptDelivery.com is a great service that I have used before. After sending out a query with them, I got about twenty requests to read my script from agents and producers. I’ve heard good things about SellaScript.com, but I haven’t tried them out yet. Their service sends your query out to over 5,000 agents, managers, and producers.
Just be careful not to get dragged into any scams when using these kinds of services. They send your query to a lot of legitimate industry companies, but they’ll also send it to some hack jobs who will get back to you saying they’ll get your script sold in no time if you just pay them a small (often several hundred dollar) service fee.
But you know better than to fall for something like that.
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. ~Francis Bacon
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth
