Category: Productivity

The March TVWriter™ Advanced Workshop has 2 Openings

writersm1Yeppers, you heard it here. The next Advanced Online Workshop starts March 19th, a week from today, and we have two openings left.

If you’re ready to dive in and learn more at each of the four meetings than you ever thought you’d learn in, oh, a whole semester in a normal writing class, then now’s a perfect time to sign on and be amazed by Our Beloved Leader, LB – AKA Larry Brody, the dude behind this site.

Editing/cutting down on wordage is everything to LB, so we’re going to follow his lead. Which means that instead of going into all those details, details, details about what the Workshop is and how it operates, we’re sending you straight to the Advanced Online Workshop Page. read article

3 Big Myths About Writers

Good morning! We’ve found an exciting analysis of writing! That we can agree with! Wotta great way to start a TVWriter™ day!

A plusby Amanda

Megan McArdle wrote an interesting piece for The Atlantic about why writers are the worst procrastinators:

Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got A’s in English class. (There are exceptions, but they often also seem to be exceptions to the general writerly habit of putting off writing as long as possible.) At an early age, when grammar school teachers were struggling to inculcate the lesson that effort was the main key to success in school, these future scribblers gave the obvious lie to this assertion. Where others read haltingly, they were plowing two grades ahead in the reading workbooks. These are the kids who turned in a completed YA novel for their fifth-grade project. It isn’t that they never failed, but at a very early age, they didn’t have to fail much; their natural talents kept them at the head of the class. read article

Creativity and Madness

This probably is a place we shouldn’t go cuz…well, cuz many of us here at TVWriter™ just plain assume that creativity and madness go together. Which means that reconciling meds that stop the madness with our writing needs sometimes becomes overwhelmingly stressful all by itself.

But that’s just, you know, us:

Medsby Gila Lyons

I had rarely felt so alive, so close to the spitting pulse of energy and awakened life. I moved from the Berkshires to New York City for graduate school, to pursue an MFA in writing. My first year was an exhilarating blur of freedom and power. Each morning when I stepped out of my apartment, I felt like I owned the world. I felt beautiful and talented and young. I knew famous people, I was creatively inspired, I was meeting regularly with editors and publishers who were interested in my writing. My only responsibilities were to read, study with some of my literary heroes, write, and teach part-time. But by the end of my third year in the city, an anxiety disorder that had plagued me since the beginning of my life, and would flare up and calm down on a strange circadian rhythm of misery, had gotten so bad it reduced me to a quivering non-functioning bundle of raw nerves. I barely squeaked by in my last semester of my program, writing, reading, and teaching between emergency room visits, therapy appointments, panic attacks, and crippling phobias. read article

How to Write for a Living

Something for all you little Hemingways (Whedons?) out there.

And please don’t bitch about the condescending sentence above. We adapted it from the Best Screenplay acceptance speech of one of our literary heroes, a certain Sly Stallone (yeah, he really got an Oscar for the first ROCKY; so tell us again what’re we busting our butts for?):

by James Altucher

so sophisticated read article

OUTLINES ARE GOOD, AND 6 MORE FICTION WRITING RULES I HATE TO ADMIT ARE TRUE

Writing rules! Some folks love and need ’em! Other folks hate and ignore ’em! What to do? What to do?

writing-lessonsby Rachel Simon

As of last night, I am just over halfway into the second draft of my still-untitled screenplay. I’ve been working on the script, a dark comedy about a college freshman’s return to her hometown over Thanksgiving break, for about three months now. The first draft, a 93-page, incoherent mess of “writing,” took a little over a month; I wrote a few pages each night, and by November, I had a full-length, albeit horrible, script in my hands. I began editing a few weeks later, and although it still needs a ton of work before I can call it done, it’s edging closer to becoming a final product.

Everyone, from bestselling authors to students in A.P. Lit, knows that writing isn’t easy. There’s the creativity, and the motivation, and the hours of work, and, perhaps most importantly, actually finding the time to get it done. As someone who’s known she’s wanted to be a writer since first grade, I’ve long come to terms with the fact that writing takes work. Still, after so many years of practice, I thought I’d mastered it pretty well. I rarely had trouble putting pen to paper, save for a few essays here or there, and when I did encounter writer’s block, it typically lasted a matter of minutes. All in all, I figured I was one of the lucky ones; writing just seemed to come easy to me. read article