40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
TVWriter™ has found a new website that we think every writer should know about. It’s called Aerogramme Writers’ Studio (no, we don’t know why – yet), and it’s chock full of info like this:
‘Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliché, it’s the key to victory over fear and its cousin, depression.’ – Robert McKee, Story
A quick tip from an author to be respected:
by Rita KarnoppEveryone says to begin at the beginning – but don’t forget – begin with action. You must grab an editor or agent within the first two sentences of your manuscript, then within the first one thousand words.
Make the ‘reader’ care immediately about your character(s) giving them challenges, personality, temperament, a defect or two, and of course assets.
This article is from a series of writing tips for kids. But, hey, we’re all kids, aren’t we? Otherwise how could we be writers?
by Niall LeonardThe crime novel, as a visit to any good bookshop will tell you, is a huge category, and I would never claim to know the definitive method of constructing and writing one; I can only go from my own experience of writing for TV shows like Silent Witness and Wire in the Blood, and the crime novel trilogy that started with Crusher.
The best place to start is with a story that fascinates you as a writer. If you feel excited writing it there’s a far better chance your readers will feel excited too. Real life is always the best source of stories, but never rely on newspapers or TV for the whole truth: journalists often omit inconvenient facts, or simply get stuff wrong, and TV writers constantly cheat and fudge reality to make their story work better, or to fit a timeslot or a budget. Recycling other writers’ work is not good writing any more than reheating a supermarket meal in a plastic tray is good cooking – research is essential if you want your tale to ring true.
A writer writes – right?
And what could be more important to writing than creativity.
I think we all know the image of the ‘starving writer’ is long gone. The large majority of writers and I mean published and even often published writers are pressed to supplement their writing passion with a day job. Heads up writers, those are the facts of life.
The question then becomes, what kind of day job? There are well known writers such as Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code) who taught school. That can be a great writers’ day job with long breaks in the summer and usually winter and spring as well. There are drawbacks too. Teachers are often overwhelmed with work during the regular school year with class planning, teaching, grading papers and possibly even drawing duty supervising playgrounds and parking lots. It could mean the writer finds time to write only during breaks in teaching. And if you want to teach lower grades and write, say erotic romance novels, that could be a bit tricky. You might need a pen name to say nothing of how you handle book related appearances. Just a thought.
Some other writers choose jobs that call for them to write during the day such as technical writing, resume writing, public relations, catalog description writing. These all give the writer the opportunity to exercise his or her writing muscle. The down side to that job is it could be very hard to work on your great American novel at day’s end after having written all day. Some aren’t the least bit deterred and pound out those thousands of additional words even after a day at such a job and the benefit of that kind of work is the potential for a great information flow that might be used in a novel.