Category: Resources

40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.

The Most Popular TVWriter™ Status Update on Facebook

by Larry Brody

We all know that Facebook keeps an enormous amount of information on all of its users.

One of the bits FB collects is how many viewers any given status update has, and there’s even a way to find out. (No, I don’t know how to do it deliberately. I just know that whenever I go to the TVWriter™ FB page – or whatever they call those things now – it tells me how many people saw each post…and then, for purposes of comparison, I assume, it tells me how many people have seen what it says is, “your most popular post.” read article

Writers on Writing: Mark Twain

He should’ve been a TV writer:

Not the way we usually envision Sam Clemens but still, the way he once looked

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
– Letter to Emeline Beach, 10 Feb 1868

via Gwyneth read article

Passion, Addiction, and Art

Who you calling an amateur? Huh? Huh?

Author Steven Pressfield

Are You Trapped in a “Shadow Career”? The Artist vs The Addict – Jocelyn K. Glei

A few months ago, a colleague of mine told me about meeting a young woman who was “passionate” about writing. He asked her what she had written recently, and she said nothing. In recounting the story to me, he said, “How can you say you’re passionate about something if you’re not doing anything about it?” Good question.

And yet, this is a common affliction. Many of us feel passionate about a particular job or creative project or cause, but we don’t take action on it. Why? Are we addicted to failure? Addicted to distraction? Addicted to money?Novelist and War of Art author Steven Pressfield gets at the crux of this conundrum in his excellent new book, Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work. I was particularly struck by his distinction between “the artist” and “the addict,” wherein the former is living out a productive, creative career, while the latter is caught in an endless loop of aspiration and yearning that never gets backed up with meaningful action. read article

Anybody Remember Radio?

A message of profound importance for those of us who…listen:

The Best Websites for Listening to Internet Radio and Downloading and Streaming Free Music

When was the last time you listened to over-the-air FM radio? There are so many options on the internet for listening to thousands of different radio stations in many different genres and for downloading a lot of music for free. read article

Jack London Wanted to Mentor You

So once upon a time the writer of Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, White Fang, and tons of other books and stories was just another guy who wanted to write. Here’s his view of what he did to make himself into something more:

Call of the Wild: Jack London’s Advice on Honing Your Creative Craft – by Scott McDowell

Sometimes its hard to know where to start. In John Barleycorn, Jack London’s vivid memoir, he describes a predicament familiar to many an aspiring artist: “My difficulty was that I had no one to advise me. I didn’t know a soul who had written or who had ever tried to write. I didn’t even know one reporter.” read article