40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
Stephen King
EDITOR’S NOTE by LB: I’m thinking that this should be #1 on anyone’s list of Writing Truisms. (Except when you get to be my age and need a thesaurus to remind you that the word “is”…is. Oy!)We’re glad you asked. Cuz we just found the answer:
In order to find out, I spoke to the screenwriter of Haunting Melissa,Andrew Klavan. Andrew, also known by his pen name Keith Peterson, is an writer of mystery novels, psychological thrillers, and screenplays for “tough-guy” mystery films. Two of Klavan’s books have been adapted into motion pictures: True Crime (1999) and Don’t Say A Word(2001). As readers of Genre Hacks know, I encourage writers to work their craft in a variety of mediums, whether novels or teleplays, blockbusters or webisodes. Andrew is in many ways the model of a writer successfully adapting to radical changes in the entertainment business and emerging technology, so I had A LOT of questions for him:
Hey, c’mon, that’s what successful writers do.
And, man is Bellisario ever successful. We’re talking about the creator-writer-producer of NCIS, JAG, MAGNUM P.I., AIRWOLF, BLACK SHEEP SQUADRON, QUANTUM LEAP. All that good stuff.
This interview isn’t new. It was recorded several years ago as part of the TV Academy’s “Archive of American Television.” But everything Bellisario says about TV writing and the TV biz is as valid as it ever was.
Over time I’ve done a lot of blog posts, guesting at some sites, creating posts for my own blog. You know, trying to toss out little helps, hints, website links that are fun and helpful for writers and readers. It’s fun and believe it or not it actually adds to my own writing, bolstering it in a way I can’t really explain.
The flip side of writing blogs is reading them. And I follow quite a few. Some make me smile, others are informative, some give me heartburn and others inspire while still others manage a weird combination. I enjoy blogs, squeeze in reading them at lunch with my Kindle online, sometimes late in the evening before bed, sometimes on the move when traveling from one place to another (no, now while I’m actually driving!); on a train, plane (hanging out in an airport actually) or as a passenger.
Why am I telling you all this? Simple, really, I was reading a friend’s blog (a friend I met in cyberspace who’s become quite the blogger) Seumas Gallacher (his blog is over at http://seumasgallacher.com/ and he made the point of how valuable it is for bloggers to share with others which blogs out there are great to read. He even started up a hashtag over on twitter #TBSU for The Blog Scratchers Union as a way of bloggers promoting bloggers who have something real to say.
A week or so ago I was talking about how in the Man of Steel movie they had Superman kill someone. No spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the movie yet, it’s your own damn fault. It did violate one of the traditional tenets that marked Superman as Superman – he doesn’t kill. Lots of innocent bystanders must have also died during his battle with Kryptonians in Smallville and Metropolis but hey – collateral damage.