Thank you Leaders Press

 

Ken Atchity

Author

Awards & Accolades

Amazon Best-Selling Author

About

About

I believe we can change the world through stories. ‘The universe,’ says Muriel Rukeyser, ‘is not made of atoms, but of stories.’ I believe in making a difference in the lives of others through the power of storytelling, both as a story teller myself and as a “story merchant” who enables other storytellers to make a difference.”

Dr. Ken Atchity loves being a writer, producer, teacher, career coach, and literary manager, responsible for launching hundreds of books and films. His life’s passion is finding great stories and storytellers and turning them into bestselling authors and screenwriters–and making films which send their stories around the world.

His books include, most recently, novels THE MESSIAH MATRIX and SEVEN WAYS TO DIE (with William Diehl) and nonfiction books for writers at every stage of their career. Based on his teaching, managing, and writing experience, he’s successfully built bestselling careers for novelists, nonfiction writers, and screenwriters from the ground up.

Atchity has also produced 30 films, including “Hysteria” (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy), “The Expatriate” (Aaron Eckhart), “The Lost Valentine” (Betty White), “Gospel Hill” (Danny Glover), “Joe Somebody” (Tim Allen), “Life or Something Like It” (Angelina Jolie), “The Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes,” “Shadow of Obsession” (Veronica Hammel), “The Madam’s Family” (Ellen Burstyn). Full film bio at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0040338/

He was born in Eunice, Louisiana; and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, where he attended Rockhurst High School (and was editor in chief of The Prep News). After undergraduate work at Georgetown (A.B., English/Classics), and getting his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale, he served as professor and chairman of comparative literature and creative writing at Occidental College and Fulbright Professor at the University of Bologna. He was Distinguished Instructor, UCLA Writers Program, and a regular columnist-reviewer for The Los Angeles Times Book Review.

As CEO of www.storymerchant.com, his Story Merchant companies, www.aeionline.com and www.thewriterslifeline.com, provide a one-stop full-service development and management center for commercial and literary writers who wish to launch their storytelling in all media–from publishing and film and television production, to Web presence and merchandising & licensing.

PRESS:

Newtopia Magazine Interview

Mongrel Patriot Review: Producer and Writer Kenneth Atchity by Tamara Spivey

A dreamer who realizes his dreams and helps others do the same, Ken Atchity has impressive credits in the worlds of film, television and publishing.

Published Book

Your VIP Biography: How to Write Your Autobiography to Land a Hollywood Deal

Amazon best-seller

Discover the not-so-secret Hollywood formula to a movie-worthy story! There’s a big market that’s hungry for a wide variety of personal stories.Yet for all the memoirs that grab Hollywood’s attention, many, many more fail to make a mark. Why do some stories get passed over while others are snatched up by Hollywood producers? This is what you’ll find out in Your VIP Biography!

ERASED⁠ Streaming on HBO Max!

 

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In "The Expatriate aka Erased" Aaron Eckhart plays a former CIA agent who moves to Belgium, trying to make a fresh go of things as the relationship with his 15-year-old daughter (Liana Libreto) has crumbled. Working for a multinational corporation as a security head, he arrives to work one day to find that the corporation doesn’t actually exist and everyone he works with has vanished. He discovers his assistant is actually a trained operative trying to kill him. On the run with his daughter, the experience forces the two to trust and work with one another. Olga Kurylenko will play his former CIA partner and lover trying to track him down.⁠
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Favorite Quotes

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

via Atchity, Kenneth. Write: Quotes

A Writer's Time: Making Time to Write - Full Interview

Film Courage: Ken Atchity on Advice I Wished I Received

What is a Beat Sheet?

A beat sheet is a writing tool used by film industry writers, directors, and producers to identify in broad strokes the sequence of events, and actions in a story. It is an abbreviated way to break down the structure of your story, making it easier to organize and change.

The beat sheet charts the sequence of events that cause your main character to do something and maps how your main character progresses in his change from the beginning to the end of your story.

Create a beat sheet by using bullet points that illustrate in one or two lines the order of your plot’s progression. Remember plot takes place when a character does something or acts upon another character.

A beat sheet is a diagnostic tool, not an end in itself. There are no hard and fast rules—it’s like jotting down the main turns on the map that takes you to the end of your story.

Then you let a road guide take a look at it, to make sure it’s going efficiently where it is meant to go.

When you actually drive there, you’ll know where you’re going—and you’ll know that your creative time not only knows but has helped you make the best possible route.

Here is an example of a beat sheet for Story Merchant.

JUDAS SILVER by Jon Hargrove

· A tight-knit group of six graduate students, all best friends, are conducting an historical excavation of a colonial church in Boston. The church had been recently burned down. They are led by an eccentric professor. The students are history grad students.

· Beneath the new church, one of the grad students comes across a previously unknown room. In fact, it's a crypt.

· They enter the room, which is burned and destroyed, and unstable at best. Dirt sifts down from above. Timbers creek. The professor finds an unusual leather pouch of coins buried with one of the corpses. He picks up the bag.

· Immediately the room starts to collapse. The students make it, but the professor is killed. His hand, the only part of him not buried, is still clutching the bag of coins.

· The professor’s corpse is later removed, and the six shocked students attend his funeral.

· Days later, the six students gather in a sort of tribute to their killed professor. They gather inside his office on the university, drinking, remembering the old man.

· The professor’s wife arrives, grieving. She hands them the bag of coins, found on the professor’s body. Since the coins are part of the excavation, she wants the students to have them to further their research.

· They open the bag and count out thirty silver coins, all ancient. Could they be the thirty coins used to betray Christ? Some of the students scoff at the idea, but others believe.

· One of the students, Gerald, an intern at the Boston Museum, has had considerable experience in dating artifacts. He tests the coins and concludes that they are over two thousand years old.

· Valery, a student at the Harvard Divinity School, uses history books to place the coins. She’s confidant that they are from the time of Christ.

· Two of the students, Robert and Piers, go out on the town. Robert immediately gets into a fight at a local club and is stabbed to death.

· The remaining five friends are in shock, horrified. Two deaths in one week. Julie, who’s into the arcane and the occult, does some more research. She discovers that the Judas coins are thought to be cursed, and she’s beginning to believe it.

· Sheila brings in a numismatist, who states that the coins could be potentially worth millions if sold to the right collector. The coins have only been rumored to exist. They have on their hands a major find.

· The students argue over who should oversee the coins, now that the coins are valuable. They quickly begin losing trust in each other. They decide to use the museum’s safe.

· Later, Piers and Julie, who are engaged to be married and have known each other since they were kids, suggest that they sell the coins, and share the money. But Sheila reminds them that the coins are not theirs to sell. They belong to the parish, and she thinks they should give the coins back.

· That night the others find Sheila dead. Fallen from her fifth floor dorm room. Her death is ruled a suicide by the police.

· The remaining four students secretly wonder if Sheila’s death was truly a suicide. None of them have alibis.

· Piers is losing it. He believes the coins are cursed and they need to be destroyed. Julie and Gerald go down to the museum to find the coins. But the coins are gone.

· They all suspect each other of stealing them, leading to another murder.

· The three remaining students have decided toss the coins into the Atlantic. Just as they are about to do so, Gerald turns a gun on them.

· They fight and Gerald is killed, falling overboard, leaving only Piers and Julie.

· Piers turns around to see his fiancée Julie holding a gun on him. She wants the coins. He tosses them to her, and she promptly pulls the trigger.

· Alone, with five of her one-time best friends now dead, Julie turns the sailboat back to shore.

· In the distance a storm is coming, and the seas are choppy. Lightning illuminates the entire sky, revealing ominous thunderheads. The little sailboat rises and falls on the massive swells, standing little chance against nature’s fury—and the curse of the coins.

THE END 

~ Excerpt from Writing Treatments that Sell

R.I.P. RUSSELL BAKER 1925-2019

Russell Baker (You might recognize his face if you watched Masterpiece Theater on PBS) died in January a few days after my birthday, and I recall with fond nostalgia our lunch at the New York City Yale Club about the same time in 1984--some months after The Los Angeles Times Book Review nominated his Growing Up for its Biography Award and asked me to do the write-up:

We share a gentler world in Russell Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Growing Up (Congdon & Weed: $15, hardcover; Plume: $5.95, paperback), a book that casts the spell of honesty on narcissism and turns it into sweet nostalgia. Baker frames his autobiography with the recent death of his mother: “It was useless now to ask for help from my mother. The orbits of her mind rarely touched present interrogators for more than a moment.”

His father died when he was five, and his memories of the wake have that family vividness that makes us realize how our memories are formed, “‘Do you want to kiss you daddy?’ Annie asked, ‘Not now,’ I said.”

Interwoven with gossip, insight and deeply moving letters from his mother’s Depression suitor, the texture of Baker’s reminiscence transforms deferred pain to present poignancy. We end at his mother’s deathbed: “Her eyelids closed again. ‘You remember Russell,’ I said. ‘And Mimi. You remember Mimi.’ Her mind seemed about to surface again. She got her eyes open.

‘Who?” ‘Russell,’ I said. ‘Russell and Mimi.’ She glared at me the way I had so often seen her glare at a dolt. ‘Never heard of them,’ she said, and fell asleep.”

The life of a human being is a million moments of action. Character is decision, a signpost along the way. Biographers serve us by revealing how human beings design for themselves the characteristic force that gives life meaning. They offer models for emulation or avoidance…

He’d written to thank me for the review, and I suggested the lunch because I’d considered him a mentor in my journalism career. During lunch we discovered dozens of what my friend the late Denise Levertov called “Interweavings,” those connections discovered only when human beings actually sit down to talk about nothing in particular, just life in general. If I recall, we talked about the creative energy caused by deadlines and word-count restrictions, Richard Nixon, and solitude vs loneliness. I walked out feeling exalted by being in the presence of a fully engaged human being. Even today I savor trips to New York, one of the cities, other than in my native South, where just plain talking is still considered the best that it gets and where many of this country’s just plain good talkers like Russell hang out.

He made it to 93, died of “complications from a fall,” as so many do, including my brother Fred this past July.

I’m sorry I can’t report massive insights from the lunch. What I can report is the gentleness of spirit that informed his writing and his life, and that made me want the genial conversation to go on forever. And so it will.

Film Courage: Top 10 Rules For Editing A Screenplay by Dr. Ken Atchity