How To Be Productive: Understanding Time, Work and Creativity by Dr. Ken Atchity

Film Courage: One of your many books Ken is WRITE TIME? And in the forward you say that the world can be divided into two people, productive people and non-productive people. And you say that productive people have a love affair with time. I’ve love to know what makes someone on the right side of time and what make someone where time is their enemy?

Dr. Ken Atchity, Author/Producer: Well that’s a very good question put in a very intelligent way that makes it hard to get a handle on it because time is…time doesn’t really exist. Time is a human construct, we created time. Squirrels and chipmunks don’t have much idea of time. They know that the sun rises and the sun goes down and they know that it rains but they don’t think the way that we do and they don’t keep track of their birthdays for example, only humans do that. And it’s unfortunate because you’re only as old as you think you are. And that’s the way a squirrel looks at it and nobody is arguing with the squirrel about it but humans know better.

Some people look at time as the enemy and some people look at it as a friend. There is an old Spanish saying that is “There is more time than life,” which I always thought was a wonderful way of looking at it because that is what a productive person would say “there is more time than life.” And another Spanish or Italian saying says that “Life is short, but wide.” And that’s another way of productively looking at it. Like people say “How can you do as much stuff as you do?” Well that’s because that’s what I do. I don’t do anything else. And I used to give classes on time management and do a lot of studies on it, in fact WRITE TIME is filled with time management theories. And one of the things I noticed about people was they had no idea where their time went. And they go “I don’t know where you find all the time.” And I would say “I don’t know where you lose it.”

I mean we all have the same amount of time and they go “How much time do we have by the way? How much time is in a week?” And 2 out of 10 people can ask the question right off the top of their heads because they’ve never really multiplied 25 by 7 and realized exactly how many hours there are in a week.

Everybody has the same amount of time. So what I would do in a time management class at UCLA or elsewhere is I would say let’s chart your time this week. I just want you to make a chart of what you do with your time and let’s come in and talk about it next week when we come back together. And they would come back in and that was before I asked them how many hours there were in a week I would wait for the third week to ask that question.

And some people would come in with 98-hour weeks and some people would come in with 62-hour weeks and nobody seem to agree in general how many hours there were in a week because the hours they gave me didn’t add up, they didn’t make sense. They’d say “I sleep six hours a day.” But it turned out in the third week of analysis that instead of 6 hours a day they were actually sleeping 10 hours. They just were telling themselves they were sleeping 6 hours a day.

How much time do you spend talking on the telephone? Most people thought they maybe spent 15 minutes a day, when in fact it might be an hour a day. And watching television (of course). Some people said they were only watching an hour a day when they were actually watching three hours a day.

But a productive person knows exactly how long it takes to do something. Like when I write a screenplay or a book, I can tell you how many hours it takes to do it and so I know that I can get it done in a certain amount of time. Agatha Christie apparently wrote as many as 10 books a year. She had to use four or five pen names because she just kept writing. When you think about it writing is a function of how fast you type. Because I always say (in my writing book including that one) if you’re making a rule not to sit down to write if you don’t know what you’re going to write then you’ll never waste any time and you’ll never have writer’s block. So simply don’t sit down until you know what you’re going to write. It’s just a matter of how fast can you type. So it’s better to be walking along the beach thinking about the structure of your story then it is to be wasting a lot of time sitting in front of the computer typing stuff and throwing it away and all that stuff. Just figure it all out in your head. “Well what if I forget it?” Well guess what? If you forget it that’s probably good. You are forgetting forgettable things? You won’t forget it when it starts getting really good. Because then it will do what Faulkner said, it will start haunting you and you won’t be able to forget it and then you’ll just write it down.

William Saroyan was asked once how long it took him to write the Human Comedy because somebody had told the journalist it had took him three days and he said “No, it took me all my life to write it. It just took me a few days to type it out.”…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).

The Power of How Stories Change The World with Ken Atchity

The Write Mindset | Thomas J. Bellezza

With fifty years’ experience in the publishing world and thirty-five years in entertainment, Dr. Ken Atchity is a self-labeled “Story Merchant” author, professor, producer, career coach, teacher, and literary manager, responsible for launching dozens of books and films.

How to Design Your Novel For Film Adaptation

Mid-career novelists seeking representation complain that none of their books have been made into films. At any given moment, we in Los Angeles have literally stacks of novels from New York publishers on our desks. Going through them to find the ones that might make motion pictures or television movies, we—and other producers, managers, and agents—are constantly running into the same problems.

If you regard your writing career as a business, you should be planning your novel at the drawing board to make it appealing to filmmakers. Here's how.

Common Problems in Novel-To-Film Adaptation

• “There’s no third act…it just trickles out.”
• “There are way too many characters and it’s not clear till page 200 who the protagonist is.”
• “I can’t relate to anyone in the book.”
• “At the end, the antagonist lays out the entire plot to the protagonist.”
• “There’s not enough action.” Not just action but dramatic action.
• “There’s nothing new here. This concept has been used to death.”/“We don’t know who to root for.”
• “The whole thing is overly contrived.”
• “There’s no dialogue, so we don’t know what the character sounds like.”
• “There’s no high concept here or a new way into a familiar concept. How do we pitch this?”
• “There’s no real pacing.”
• “The protagonist is reactive instead of proactive.”
• “At the end of the day, I have no idea what this story is ”
• “The main character is 80, and speaks only Latvian.”
• “There are no set pieces.”

Of course anyone with the mind of a researcher can list a film or two that got made despite one of these objections. But for novelists who are frustrated at not getting their books made into films that should be small consolation and is, practically speaking, a futile observation. Yes, you might get lucky and find a famous Bulgarian director, who’s fascinated with the angst of octogenarians, studied pacing with John Sales or Jim Jarmusch, and loves ambiguous endings.

But if you regard your career as a business instead of a quixotic crusade, you should be planning your novel at the drawing board to make it appealing to filmmakers.

Characters

Characters are the most important element of the story and should generate the action, the setting, and the point of view. Your job as a writer is to give us insight into each and every character in your story, no matter how evil or virtuous his or her actions may be. Characters are the heart of the drama.

1. Give us a strong protagonist whose motivation and mission shape the action and who, good or bad, is eminently relatable—and who’s in the “star age range” of 35-50 (where at any given moment twenty male stars reside, and maybe ten female stars; a star being a name that can set up the film by his attachment to it).
2. Make sure a dramatist looking at your book will clearly see three well-defined acts: act one (the setup), act two (rhythmic development, rising and falling action), and act three (climax leading to conclusive ending).
3. Express your character’s personality in dialogue that distinguishes him, and makes him a role a star would die to play.
4. Make sure your story has a clear-cut dramatic premise, e.g., unbridled ambition leads to self-destruction or you can’t go home again.

Have someone in the film industry read your synopsis or treatment before you commit to writing the novel.

Revise accordingly.

Though I’ve observed the phenomena for several decades now, it still surprises me that even bestselling novelists, even the ones who complain that no one has made a film from their books yet, don’t write novels dramatic enough to lend themselves easily to mainstream film. It’s a well-known, but lamentable, phenomenon in publishing that, with very few exceptions, the more books a novelist sells the less critical his publisher’s editors are of his work. So time and again we read novels that start out well, roar along to the halfway point, then peter off into the bogs of continuous character development or action resolution.

A publisher invests between $25,000 and $100,000 or more in publishing your novel. A low-budget feature film from a major Hollywood studio today costs at least $50 million. There is, from a business point of view, no comparison. Risking $50 million means the critical factor is raised as high as can be imagined when your book hits the “story department”—much higher than the critical factor of even the biggest publishers. Hollywood studies what audiences want by keeping track, in box office dollars, cents, and surveys–what they respond best to.

If you want to add film to your profit centers as a novelist, it would behoove you to study what makes films work. Disdaining Hollywood may be a fashionable defense for writers who haven’t gotten either rich or famous from it, but it’s not productive in furthering your cinematic career or building your retirement fund.

via Writer's Digest

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Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift bookOh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
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Listen to Brian on: The Writer’s Market Podcast

WRITE THE WORLD!

TAP-DANCING ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE

If you’re an authorpreneur, a writer, an artist trying to make it in today’s toughly competitive global market, you’re tapdancing on the narrowest bridge in the world—spanning the cactus fields of the UNKNOWN world and THE PROMISED LAND where the grass is greener, and the trees are tall and mighty.

It’s the smallest and most dynamic and most important bridge in human experience—one that everyone would like to be standing on, but few have the courage to attempt:

It’s the bridge of VISION--that links dream with reality.

It’s a very small bridge and very narrow and uncomfortable when you first step onto it. But the longer you’re on it, the more maneuvering room you realize you have. The more comfortable it becomes standing on what you recognize as the razor’s edge.

You learn to tap dance.

You learn to laugh and cry again.

You learn to enjoy the dance, to sing while you dance.

You learn perspective. You build character. You turn from butterfly to lioness.

Sooner or later, you should begin to feel, as I do, incredibly fortunate to be doing what we love the most—storytelling—and getting paid to do it. As a producer, editor, literary manager, author consultant, and brand launcher, I get to be an alchemist, turning stories into gold.

And as someone who tries hard to always think OUTSIDE THE BOX—especially since the boxes either are crumbling or have already crumbled--it has been thrilling to see my clients’ DRACULA THE UNDEAD on page one of cnn.com and on the New York Times extended list—after I added a brand name to the mix; and to be producing my clients’ Jerry Blaine and Lisa McCubbin’s THE KENNEDY DETAIL, which appears from Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster after we found a way to get Clint Hill to write the forward, and we managed to set up, with our reality partner Renegade83 a 2-hour Discovery Sunday special which garnered an Emmy nomination. These clients danced the danced successfully, and because they, like all storytellers, are inveterate masochists are already back on that bridge dancing that crazy dance again.

No one is forcing you to do this. Remind yourself of that when the going gets toughest. You’ve chosen this career, and you can only lose at it if you quit.

What you are doing, in business terms, is creating the most valuable commodity on earth, “intellectual property.” And today that is worth more than real property! 

You are entering an infinite profession, of unlimited potential. Not even the sky is the limit—my client Nik Halik’s The Thrillionaire has been in outer space! In this world of studios crashing, networks retrenching, publishers conglomerating, where everything is changing all the time—at least one thing is constant: the need for stories never ceases.

“Trackers” are highly paid by the major studios to find stories and bring them in.

No wonder storytellers were considered sacred among the ancient Greeks--because they were the channelers of STORIES, stories that described reality in terms humans can relate to.

Therefore don’t let your ego prematurely destroy your career, as I have seen it do for so many writers. “No ego” should be your mantra, as you take your WORK, not YOURSELF, seriously.

Eventually, on that razor’s edge, you’ll learn that though the Promised Land IS worth the promise it’s the struggle to get there that is the most valuable experience of your life.

As storytellers who are here this weekend because you actively pursue your vision, you know full well how narrow the bridge we stand on is, how fragile. But you should also know that we’re heroes for even attempting to cross this bridge. 

I’d like read a tribute to your work by the greatest Greek poet since Homer and Sappho. His name was Constantine P. Cavafy, and he lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and died less than a hundred years ago:

The First Step


The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
"I've been writing for two years now
and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritus retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing."

So let’s pause to celebrate--and applaud ourselves right now--for even being here today, on this step—whether it is your first, or whether you’ve taken a few steps already. If you are among the latter, you’ll appreciate the words of the great playwright-poet Samuel Beckett: “Do not come down the ladder. I have taken it away.”

Let’s also face it: you’re in “show BUSINESS,” as my client and partner Michael A. Simpson constantly reminds me; and you must deal with it as the BUSINESS of SHOW. What years have taught me is how important it is, never more so than today, to understand the BUSINESS of being a visionary, a person others call “mad” or “insane.” Remind them of Salvador Dali’s response: “The difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.”

I always say that the difference between a visionary and a con man in the creative world is SUCCESS. No one believes you can really do it, because everyone has told them how hard it is—and they themselves are too fearful to try.

Yes, it is difficult. That’s why, though everyone in the world has a story, NOT everyone—only YOU—are doing something about it.

Your personal cutting edge difference will be dealing with your career as a business on all fronts. Business requires a plan, an investment, a marketing program, and unceasing determination to move the flag across the field, remembering, for consolation, that if you die in the midst of your own dream that, by definition, has to be a happy death!

As Muriel Rukeyser said, for us humans, “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Whatever it’s really made of, all that matters is how we perceive it. And it’s through stories that we form our perception.

When you’re standing on the razor’s edge in fear, or complaining—as all of us constantly do--remind yourself:

No one is FORCING you to tell your stories to the world. No one is holding this gun to your head but yourself.

You’re here by your free choice, while they are behind their counters or their commuting dashboards or their tellers’ windows because they are afraid to take the chances you are getting used to.

Meanwhile, you are following your dream.

Welcome to the world of storytellers:

What is a storyteller? A storyteller is a simply a communicative dreamer—a person who dares to learn how to communicate her dreams to all of us.

Doing so is not only his privilege, it’s his responsibility. I always told my Occidental College students, “If you have a dream, and fail to express it, you have denied all of us a unique vision that only you can bring us.”

But Aristotle said, “Excellence is not a plan.” Dreamers need to plan. An authorpreneur who truly wishes to succeed in the commercial world of storytelling needs to analyze it from a business point of view. AMBITION and VISION are NOT ENOUGH. You must equal them with CRAFT, TECHNIQUE, AND SKILL.

In my book, A WRITER’S TIME, I wrote that four things are needed to succeed in Hollywood:

1) Persistence (endurance, determination)

2) Contacts (networking)

3) Being a fun person to work with (and its corollary, “Staying off everyone’s life is too short list”) and

4) TALENT

It’s sobering to realize that any one of the first three are sufficient in themselves. Bad movies can be made through sheer persistence; mediocre books can be published just through strong contacts. But the 4th, the one we’re all looking and hoping for, is NOT sufficient. Talent alone must be combined with the others.

And add LUCK or GOOD TIMING and, remembering what someone said that the “harder I work the luckier I get.”

You might also add ORIGINALITY—which Joe Roth defined as “being able to think of something that hasn’t been on TV!”

Recently, trying to maintain the business of show business, my company has evolved. We raise independent financing for films, and encourage writers to become filmmakers to move their projects forward. We consult with writers on their career strategies one on one. We launch brands. As literary managers, we look for the next Sue Grafton or Robert Ludlum whose vision CLEARLY extends into the future.

What we learn from the tap-dance on the razor’s edge is:


TOUGHEN UP.

KEEP MOVING FORWARD DESPITE YOUR PRESENT MOODS. A week from now, you won’t even remember how you feel today; so don’t let it stop you from working. My wife Kayoko is always reminding me that Gandhi said, “Full effort is full success.”

PERSIST. NEVER GIVE UP. Yes, you may be going through hell. But “if you’re going through hell,” Winston Churchill advised, “keep going!”

NEVER PUT DEADLINES ON YOUR CAREER.

TAKE YOUR CAREER, NOT YOURSELF, SERIOUSLY. Don’t go from saying “I just want to be better” to “I just want to write what I want to write.” I’ve repeatedly seen clients lose the humble perspective created before success hit them, and sabotage their careers.

NEVER PUT ASIDE YOUR VISION, BUT PERFECT IT, PERFECT IT, PERFECT IT and make allies of those who can help you do that to bring your craft and skills to the level of your talent and ambition. If you continue pursuing your dream no matter what until you achieve it—and then you’ll have bigger dreams, of course—by definition, YOU CAN’T FAIL. Carlyle put it this way: “Success is steady progress toward a worthy goal.”

Walt Disney was turned down 302 times before he got financing for Disneyland.

Frank Herbert’s DUNE was rejected 36 times. Don’t let your representative give up at 32!

George Lucas was forced to put up his own money to pay for “Star Wars” because NO ONE believed in his vision. By the time the film came out, he was bankrupt. He is now fabulously wealthy of course—PRECISELY BECAUSE HE WAS UNABLE TO SELL ANY OF THE RIGHTS TO THE FILM OR ITS SEQUELS. Shakespeare played politics to get the Globe Theater built for his own plays. Sophocles and Aeschylus had to do the same thing in the time of classical Greece. Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, in fact most late nineteenth century novelists began their careers SELF-PUBLISHING.

Jerzy Kosinski’s STEPS won awards, but was rejected by publishers 34 times—once by its very own publisher, after it had already been published.

Remember what William Goldman observed, in his Adventures in the Screen Trade: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

In today’s tough world of authorpreneurship, be flexible and always THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX.

Yes, the business of becoming and being a professional writer is hard. The hard part is the great part. That’s why you’ve chosen to do it. The river is wide between where we are now and the success and attention we want is on the other side. The razor’s edge is thin and dangerous. You don’t NEED to do this. You’re DESTINED to do this.

What could be a happier mission in life?

How can you fail at being yourself?

And now you know what the bridge is—a razor’s edge--and how to dance on it, just promise me and yourself that you won’t fall off.

 

Kevin Flanagan of District Magazine talks to Ken About the Art of Storytelling!

Kevin Flanagan talks to Hollywood producer and author Kenneth John Atchity, about the importance of story and why the Irish are good at telling them.

Kevin met Ken Atchity at the international writer’s symposium held in Dublin. There he was able to get the producer’s views on the magic of story from the man who is known internationally as a “Story Merchant.”

I love Hollywood.

In 2003 I spent a month in Los Angeles attempting to sell my script to a Hollywood agent. It was memorable queuing at the local Kinko’s store where they had a photocopying machine that only copied film scripts and the queue was long! People are friendly, once they heard I was from Ireland our individual projects were discussed and phone numbers were swapped. As they say, you have to be friendly in Tinseltown because you never know who you will need on the way up (and down).

The other thing I loved was sitting in my favourite coffee shop Urth Caffé on Melrose Avenue watching drop-dead gorgeous waitresses serve us coffee. They all looked, to my naive eye, like film stars. My cynical Irish friend burst my bubble. He had been working in Hollywood for years and said, between sips of his soya latte, ‘beautiful people are two-a-penny here!’.

As I continued to sit with my mouth wide-open my friend nudged me. A famed Hollywood producer had arrived outside the patio in an open-topped Bentley. Heads swivelled as he took a table, surrounded by a group of acolytes dancing attendance. Certainly the waitress perked up.

Everyone in Hollywood, I soon discovered, was climbing the greasy pole. Actresses, writers, directors, but at the top, wielding the real power, was the fabled Hollywood producer who can make (and break) anyone. You could smell their power and sense their arrogance.

My impression of Hollywood producers had not changed over the years till I meet Ken Atchity in Dublin this June past. Atchity has produced over 30 Hollywood movies and is known in the book world as the ‘Story Merchant’ because he also sells stories to publishers–and publishes them through Story Merchant Books. Soft spoken, educated, he is not at all like the usual hustler I saw on a daily basis in Hollywood. Ken Atchity is above all a reflective man who has built his life around the concept of “story.” He has been an academic, a writer, before he became a movie producer. He loves “story” and wants to share that love.

He certainly did that in Dublin when he spoke this summer to a group of writers, and what he said has stayed with me and helped inform my own work. According to Atchity, whatever the genre – movie, TV series, book or computer game – its core chances of success all come down to story. But story is not confined to the creative arts.

“Look at Brexit,” Atchity says as we sip a drink after his lecture in the bar of the famed Gresham Hotel, “the day after the referendum a lot of British people wanted to have another vote as they were led to believe Brexit was a story about the immigration crisis. But it was also about 200 other things as well: the value of pound and the stock market. But the story was moulded around immigration and national identity and people bought into it.”

Ken lowers his glass and smiles, “Lying is an old Catholic word for what we all do all day – another form of storytelling. If your wife walks down the steps after a long night out and asks “how am I looking?” do you tell the truth or a story to get by and not stir up a row?” He takes another sip. “Everybody is telling a story!”

Storytelling goes back to the dawn of man, Atchity insists, and Homer was the greatest storyteller of them all, probably as product of the oral tradition of storytelling having to be committed to memory. It becomes deeply ingrained.

“Stories are there to warn us what happens when people bring disaster on themselves and their people. To this day story still acts as an exhortation and a warning as what happens when someone brings destruction on all around him. Great stories are changing the world by changing the perception of people.”

Atchity believes storytelling impacts profoundly on both young and old.

“You hear parents saying disparaging remarks about groups of people – say Poles or black people – and you wake up one day as an adult and you believe fully in them.”

But despite this pessimistic view Atchity thinks things in the world are actually improving.

“Fewer people are dying in wars. People are giving up smoking. Communication is helping us. As the saying goes, living well is the best revenge and we are slowly learning to leave things behind. Optimism is the more logical of two options. I love the story of the optimist who was pushed off Empire State Building and half way down says, “Well, so far, so good!”’

Atchity has always believed in the power of “story” and I ask him why that is.

“I think it all goes back to my childhood growing up on front porches in my Cajun Louisiana (maternal) family. My uncles and cousins were storytellers – some accomplished, some not so good. I loved the feeling of community that happened when they began swapping stories and jokes. And though I studied analysis and logic in Jesuit classrooms my heart was with the storytellers. As an Italian friend of mine said one day, trying to explain his new wife’s erratic behavior, “Let me tell you a story instead–isn’t life, after all, just a story?” It’s the power of stories that change the world more than anything else.”

Among a vast oeuvre Atchity has produced his share of horror movies, including Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes. But horror is a genre in decline. Does Atchity have his views on why this is?

“Aristotle’s theory was about how audience needs catharsis. They see horror on stage, walk out of the theatre and give a sigh of relief that the “horror” does not affect their lives. But in today’s world all that has changed. Daily we hear and see horrific things – decapitations and mass murder at every turn. Horror is no longer escapism. Audiences now need to escape their daily dose of real live horror by going to the movie house. There they can watch heroes in blockbusters win and the bad guys lose.”

Despite the decline Atchity still continues to produce movies in the horror genre, “At the moment we are working on a very low budget horror spoof – Friday 31st – and that maybe is the way to go.” // We discuss our best loved horror movies. One of Atchity’s favorites was filmed on the campus he was attending at Georgetown University in Washington.

“Scenes from The Exorcist were shot at my alma mater. I remember reading the book in the early 70’s and being scared to death. Having been raised a Roman Catholic I believed it was all real! From a pure horror point of view it’s my favorite.”

The Exorcist was released in 1973 but not shown in Ireland till 1998. How things have changed! Now, according to Atchity, “horror movies are relegated to low-budget productions with an occasional excursion into brilliance. The market isn’t as robust as the general market is. It’s a selective audience, that doesn’t appear to be growing—because of the advent of alternate media such as online games, web series. Cheap ones are made because the loyal horror audience will see it and is enough by itself to make them profitable even if they don’t cross over to the larger audience.”

We move on to discussing another core shift in storytelling – the move from movies to TV mega stories, Game of Thrones being the prime example. Are these TV series successful because they allow “story” to be told in greater depth?

“A series or miniseries allows the storyteller to develop the characters more fully than the restricted time allowed for a film. The best writers and directors today are in television as well as film.”

Ken has enjoyed walking in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom while in Dublin, and I ask him for any words of wisdom for modern Irish writers.

“Tell a story with universal impact – something we all care about – and make sure it has three well-defined acts and each act is powerfully dramatic. It’s also important to make sure the main character is someone we can all relate to, even if he’s not likeable. Do all that and get someone in Hollywood to give you feedback on it.”

Irish writers get on the case – you know the right person in Hollywood to send it to!

Read more at District Magazine

How to Turn a Book Into a Movie with Ken Atchity

Kenneth Atchity began writing stories as a child under his mother’s supervision. By the age of 16 he was a book reviewer for the Kansas City Star (no one at the newspaper realized how old he was when they hired him over the phone).

Ken started in the film industry after working as a professor for 17 years because he wanted to work on the creative side of story rather than the critical side. He came up with an idea that turned into 16 films and never looked back. His company has developed over 30 films and published over 150 novels. Ken has a reverence for stories and the art of storytelling that shines through in this interview.

Listen to interview

• The way to sell a story to its largest audience is to write a book and make a movie out of it. You can also do it the other way, and write a book based on a movie.
• The power of having a story that is both a movie or TV show and a book is that you have two separate audiences that discover the story and each of them will seek out the story in the other medium.
• People who read the book first will watch the movie or TV show, and people who watch the TV show first will buy the book.
• To make your story into a movie or television show, it has to be highly dramatic and have a universal message that a large audience can connect with.
• A good treatment can sell them with the idea of your novel even if your novel is missing some basic elements of a good Hollywood screenplay.
• A treatment is a brief written pitch that shows the movie that exists in the story. Ken’s book on treatments can be found in the Links and Resources section below.
• After you’ve written your treatment you should reach out to a contact in Hollywood.
• If you don’t know anyone directly to you don’t have any friends who might be able to connect with someone one place to look is writers conferences. You can go to writers conferences and sign up for a lecture from somebody who is connected in Hollywood and that will give you a point of contact.
• When you meet your point of contact simply ask them for their advice. Don’t ask them to buy your story idea. Give them the elevator pitch of your story. If they’re excited by that give them a copy of your treatment and they’ll look at it seriously. Often if they aren’t interested for some reason they may be able to point you in the direction of somebody who might be.
• Don’t offer to buy them lunch. Just ask for five minutes of their time.
• You should be able to tell people what your story is about one or two sentences. If it takes longer something is wrong with your story.
• The pitch for under siege starring Stephen Seagal was Die Hard on a boat.
• the pitch for Splash starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah was: It’s a fish out of water story only she’s a mermaid.
• The secret to a good pitch is to make it short. Make it something that leads the person you’re talking to to ask questions.
• If you’re in a producer’s office in Hollywood and they ask you five questions about your story, they virtually invested in your story already.
• The most important character in every story is the audience. Always pay attention to the audience. Always be thinking about where the audience’s attention is at.
• Structure your story for your audience.
• How to engage your audience when they aren’t responding to the story you’re telling.
• After you’ve sold your story stop talking.
• Never bring notes to a pitch meeting.
• Stories are about humanity.
• Storytelling is about capturing the audience in a relationship with you that leaves the rest of the world out.
• The audience lives inside your story. That’s why it’s so important to not have anything in the story that takes them out of the story.
• The most important thing when selling your story is to keep the audience on the edge of their seat all the way through the pitch. If you can do that chances are very good story will sell.
• Ideas themselves don’t make movies. Good storytelling makes movies. Writing a good story shows that you’re a good storyteller.
• There are no new stories. It’s how you tell the story that makes the difference.
• An idea can’t be protected. Only written documents can be protected. If you have a good story idea at least write a treatment of it so it can be protected.
• The human race runs on stories.
• Storytelling is a sacred vocation.
• Before the written word storytelling was how civilization got passed down from generation to generation.
• Storytellers were a protected class of citizen in ancient times.
• Storytelling is our primary way of holding reality together.
• The myth of the starving artist is just another destructive story we tell ourselves. It’s a story rooted in victimhood, and no good protagonist is ever a victim for long. Western culture prefers stories of heroes who overcome their obstacles.
• Salvador Dali once said: The difference between a madman and myself is I am not mad.
• The only difference between an artist who is seen as crazy and an artist who is seen as a genius in success.
• The only way to combat the naysayers in your life is simply keep writing.
• As a writer always remember that your calling is writing. Keep a sense of perspective when people try to tear you down.
• Start writing more it will get rid of all these moods you’re having.— Ray Bradbury
• You have to have the story you’re telling nailed down, but you also have to have your personal story nailed down as well.
• Writers write. That’s what they do.
• The only way to be sure they will succeed as a storyteller is to keep telling stories until you succeed. You have to persist as long as it takes.
• The only way to fail is to give up. If you don’t give up you will eventually succeed, or die trying.
• As a writer you’re living a dream life. Millions of people dream of having the courage to do what you’re doing. If you die without any external success, you still died in the middle of living a dream life. Is there anything better than that?
• The sure fire cure for writers block: never sit down to write until you know what you’re going to write about.
• The good thing about writing is that it’s a democratic art form. Anyone can write. It’s not limited to a specific social class or morality.

Basic Elements of a Hollywood Story

• A protagonist we root for and identify with.
• An antagonist for the protagonist to struggle against.
• A visible goal that the protagonist wants to achieve.
• Obstacles for the protagonist to overcome.
• Follow the three act structure. Make sure your story has a beginning, middle and end.
• Make sure that your story has a big climax. Hollywood movies need big climaxes.
• Make sure your story has a satisfying ending. 

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Interview – Ken Atchity on Brae MacKenzie

 
Kenneth John Atchity Author of Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory – Which was his Ph.D. Dissertation. The work was awarded Yale Graduate School’s Highest Academic Honor – The Porter Prize; and was later published by Southern Illinois University Press (Edited by John Gardner).  Mentors at Yale Included Thomas Ber.

Kenneth John Atchity Author of Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory – Which was his Ph.D. Dissertation. The work was awarded Yale Graduate School’s Highest Academic Honor – The Porter Prize; and was later published by Southern Illinois University Press (Edited by John Gardner).  Mentors at Yale Included Thomas Bergin, Thomas Greene, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Richard Ellinger, Eric Segal and Lowry Nelson Jr.

His Twenty Books Include:

Homer: Critical Essays (G.K.Hall), The Renaissance Reader (HarperCollins), The Classical Greek Reader (Harper-Oxford University Press),Italian Literature: Roots & Branches (Yale University Press), A Writer’s Time (W.W. Norton) Seven Ways to Die (with William Diehl) (Story Merchant Books) The Classical Roman Reader (Harper-Oxford), The Messiah Matrix.

Kenneth represents writers of both fiction and nonfiction. He accounts for numerous bestsellers and movies both produced in television and on the big screen. In 2011 he was nominated for an Emmy Award for Producing “The Kennedy Detail.”

We are very pleased to introduce our readers to his latest addition to storytelling which is called Brae MacKenzie.

Ken, Brae Mackenzie is a romance of Mythic Identity. What inspired her story?

I had it in the back of my mind for years, ever since I did a driving tour of Scotland and fell in love with the place and its mysterious past.

What made you decide to try out Romance?

Actually romance, for me, is a ‘return to the old neighborhood.’ My first film project after leaving academia was a series of sixteen romance movies (“Shades of Love”) that allowed me to explore romance from every angle. I’ve been in love with romantic literature since college when I read Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World and realized the power of romantic love over our western imaginations. I conceived of Brae Mackenzie as the first of a series of romances about American women returning to the countries of their origins to discover their true selves in the myths of that country.

How has the audience received the book since its launch last week?

It’s too early to tell. It hasn’t been out long enough for anyone even to read it. I hope your followers will take a look—and write a review on amazon.com

What made you decide to give it a mythical underline?

It wasn’t really a conscious decision. I’ve always loved romance and when I wrote one I wanted to explore my equal fascination with local myths, which form such a strong part of our unconscious minds, our yearnings and questionings.

Can you tell us a bit more about your main character? What makes her relatable?

Like so many contemporary women Brae is juggling so many balls she doesn’t have time and space to question what she’s doing. Beneath it all, though, is that nagging feeling that she’s missing out on life—that there’s something in her depths that isn’t being satisfied.

Can you give us a bit more insight into what it takes for you to write your stories?

I realize, after readying this book for publication, that it takes courage among other things. What if no one likes the story? What if there’s no audience for it? At the end of the day, though, it’s a story that has haunted me for years and I felt it deserved to be out there to make its own way in the world.

Does it involve a lot of research and planning?
I tend to start with a bunch of facts that intrigue me, then find a story to incorporate them. As I write the story, I don’t stop to check out the veracity of the details—I just imagine what the story needs. Then, when I get stuck somewhere, I turn to serious research to get me unstuck and generally discover that the facts I imagined are more accurate than I could have predicted; I also discover facts that I had not imagined, and work them into the story as I go along. Finally when the first draft is done, I do the most serious checking and research which tends to enrich the story. That’s where the serendipity happens—when you discover facts you had no idea were out there and they somehow magically seem to work in your story.

How long does it take from an idea to a full book?

In this case it’s taken 30 years or so. I did the first draft when I was teaching mythology at Occidental College, shoved it in a drawer somewhere as other things took my attention. Found it, when cleaning out my drawers and asked my top editor to read it and tell me what she thought. She insisted I finish and publish it, so I spent a year revising it repeatedly until it was at the point where I needed to get it born and out there on its own to find its fate.

What’s next for Ken the author?

I just finished the first volume of my memoirs, A Story Merchant’s Story: Growing up Atchity. Now I’m working on the second “novel of mythic identity,” this one about a Sicilian-American woman, faced with a crisis in her career, who turns her back on it to go to Sicily for the first time and discover her origins. I love Sicily so much I couldn’t resist it.
What other romance novels are you thinking of?

I love to travel, to learn new things, to eat the local cuisine so I’m hoping to do a Japanese novel, as well as ones set in Ireland, England, France, Spain, Mongolia, maybe Brazil and Mexico.

Where can people look forward to meet you?

I’ll be meeting and assisting writers at the Dublin Writers Conference in June, hosted by Laurence O’Bryann of booksgosocial.com.  Sign up at http://thebookpromoter.com/conference/ I’d love to meet your readers there!

Where can readers find the books?

Brae MacKenzie Available on Amazon

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Dr. Ken Atchity Discusses the Creative Process with Patrick Will

Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist, and why The Meg took 22 years to make.

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What is “Coverage” and How Does It Affect Whether My Book Sells to Hollywood? by Kenneth Atchity

I read part of it all the way through.—Samuel Goldwyn


The Hollywood decision-maker who receives your story submission rarely has time to read it him- or herself. They assign it “for coverage” to the story department, and receive back a coverage. “Coverage” is the term used in Hollywood for the document that determines the fate of most story submissions. It’s a document, created by a story editor, in the story department of an agency, production company, studio, or broadcaster that analyzes your story’s film-worthiness.  A typical coverage includes a “grading system” something like the following that suggests that the submission (screenplay, novel, nonfiction book, or treatment) is:

PASS— Nothing to spend more time on. So the executive who receives this recommendation returns the submission.

RECOMMEND— The grade you’re looking for. The executive reads at least part of the submission and, if he agrees with his story editor, contacts the writer to ask about its rights status.

RECOMMEND, W/DEVELOPMENT— Don’t let this one go, but it’s not perfect and needs fixing.

CONSIDER— The story editor isn’t sure. Usually this grade leads to a “second read,” from a different story editor.

CONSIDER, WITH DEVELOPMENT— Meaning it’s worth taking on for development, but not yet ready for production. In many cases this will lead to a pass because most companies are so swamped with production and development projects that they simply have no bandwidth for developing another one.
Sometimes an additional category might be included:

KEEP AN EYE ON THE WRITER? That’s a Yes, or No.

The coverage typically contains a number of analytical sections to make sure all aspects of the project are addressed:

TITLE and GENRE: The title of the submission is followed by a statement of what genre it falls into: Fantasy/Adventure, Action, Romance, Drama, Horror, Thriller, Comedy, True Story, etc.

TYPE: Screenplay? Manuscript? Nonfiction? Novel? Treatment?

LOGLINE: This is a one- or two-sentence summary of the story, sometimes referred to as the pitch-line. The best are the shortest: “A man is mistakenly left behind when his ships leaves in a hurry. On Mars.”

SYNOPSIS— This is a straightforward outline of your story, to give the executive an overview of what happens in it. It describes all main plot points and details necessary to understand the story. The preferred length of a synopsis is a page or two. When it’s longer, it’s usually a sign to the executive that the story is too complicated to make a good film.

MARKET POTENTIAL— This section is a comment on the audience the project is aimed at, and whether the story editor feels it fits that market or departs from its needs or expectations, whether it’s a fresh approach to an important story, whether the story is “elevated” by its theme to make it a worthy film or series. Often names successful films that resemble this one.

STRUCTURE— This is an overall comment on how well the structure of the story holds together and accomplishes its purpose, but also where it falters in doing so. Do events unfold cohesively? Are plot points used effectively? Does the story reveal a three-act structure? A typical comment, “There seems to be repetition of the same events over and over again throughout the story.”

CONFLICT— This crucial section indicates whether there is sufficient conflict, both external (in the events of the story) and internal (within the characters).  Is the main external conflict of sufficient formidable force to hold audiences? Is it supported by smaller external conflicts, as well as by internal conflict on the part of the characters, especially protagonist and antagonist?

CHARACTER— Is the protagonist fully formed? Do we care about Does he or she have a back story, a mission, and does he or she experience change by the end? Are the supporting characters strong?

DIALOGUE— Is the dialogue unique to each character or do they all sound the same? Does the dialogue move the story along, providing information and containing subtext without being on-the-nose or unbelievable?

PACING— Are scenes or events an appropriate length for their purpose? Is there a sense of build-up, a balance between tension and release, mystery and discovery? Sufficient twists and turns, cliffhangers and surprises? Does each scene or event depend on what came before?

LOGIC— This section talks about plot holes or points lacking sufficient clarity? Do events make sense within the world of the story? For example, do science fiction and fantasy worlds remain consistent with their own set of rules?

CRAFT— Is the writing itself clear, concise, and descriptive? Is there an even balance of action and dialogue? Is proper formatting employed? Are there spelling or grammatical errors?

Yeah, it’s pretty thorough, isn’t it? And here’s the catch: the writer who submitted the story will rarely see the coverage that determines its fate. It’s a real philosophical dilemma. Given that the coverage is so important, and that you won’t see it, how should you behave?

The answer is to know that the coverage, like the troll under the bridge, is there lurking in wait for you–and to disarm it in advance by making sure your story addresses all the categories of expectation.

If, in its current form, it does not, write a treatment of your story and submit that instead.



About Sell Your Story to Hollywood:

Through the expanding influence of the Internet and the corporatization of both publishing and entertainment, the process of getting your book to the big screen has gotten more complicated, more eccentric, and more exciting.

This little book aims to help you figure out how to get your story told on big screens or small. It’s not going to give you rules and regulations, because they simply don’t exist today. Any rule that could be promulgated has and will be broken. What this book offers instead is nearly thirty years of observation of how things happen in show business, the business of entertainment (better known around the world as Hollywood). Dr. Ken Atchity’s Hollywood experience ranges from writing to managing writers to producing their movies for television and theaters. He’s seen the Hollywood story market from nearly every angle, including legal and business affairs.

Ken Atchity spent his first career as a professor, a career he embarked upon innocently because he wanted to focus his efforts on understanding stories and helping writers get their stories told—and here he is thirty years later still pursuing the same goal—because it’s a worthy and never-ending goal.
He’s made films based on nonfiction books, and made deals for a number of nonfiction stories. But most of his experience lies in turning novels into films. As a lifelong story merchant, what Dr. Atchity develops and sells are “stories,” because he believes stories rule the world. Many of the observations outlined in this book are simply about selling stories to Hollywood.

This pocket guide will help you expedite the transformation of your show business dreams into realities.

Order your copy online here.

Film Courage: Power of Choice To Do Creative Work - Dr. Ken Atchity

 

A Very Special Interview: Shades of Love and Ken Atchity with Amanda Reyes! Happy Valentine's Day

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Unearthing great television... one program at a time

This podcast is dedicated to made for television movies and other forms of classic TV! Brought to you by Amanda Reyes (Made for TV Mayhem), Daniel R. Budnik (Bleeding Skull: A 1980s Trash Horror Odyssey), and Nathan Johnson (The Hysteria Continues), plus a few special guests who appear from time to time. With reviews, retrospectives and more, this podcast is your best source for classic television love!

Dr. Ken Atchity discusses Does Pain Create Great Artists? With Patrick Will

Ken Atchity on WillCast Podcast Hosted by Patrick Will⁠ ⁠ 

Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist.⁠ 

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How to Manage Work and Time

Have a listen: Ken Atchity on WillCast Podcast Hosted by Patrick Will⁠ ⁠ 

Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist.⁠ ⁠ 

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Dr. Ken Atchity discusses The Meg With Patrick Will

 Ken Atchity on WillCast Podcast Hosted by Patrick Will⁠ ⁠ 

Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist.⁠ 

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Dr. Ken Atchity discusses Why Picasso Will be Remembered With Patrick Will

 Ken Atchity on WillCast Podcast Hosted by Patrick Will⁠ ⁠ 

Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist.⁠ 

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Dr. Ken Atchity discusses the Artist's Control With Patrick Will

 Ken Atchity on WillCast Podcast Hosted by Patrick Will⁠ ⁠ 

Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist.⁠ 

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Dr. Ken Atchity Discusses What is Art? with Patrick Will

Have a listen: Ken Atchity on WillCast Podcast Hosted by Patrick Will⁠ ⁠ 

Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist.⁠ ⁠ 

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Dr. Ken Atchity Discusses How to handle big tasks with Patrick Will

 Have a listen: Ken Atchity on WillCast Podcast Hosted by Patrick Will⁠ ⁠ 

Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist, and why The Meg took 22 years to make.⁠ ⁠ 

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How to Write Your Screenplay in 24 Hours - Advice From Kenneth Atchity

Norman Mailer once said that “writer’s block is a failure of the ego.”
I’d rather say it’s a failure of motivation, preparation, and discipline—a failure, in other words, of time-management.

The method I describe here, based on nearly thirty years’ experience in film and television, is all about motivation, preparation, and discipline.

If you follow this system, you will be able to write a professional screenplay in 24 hours.



Sitting in front of your computer agonizing over the next word is always counterproductive.

Start by taking a solemn oath that you’ll never again sit at your computer without knowing what you’re going to write before you sit down.

By simply preparing your thoughts and ideas ahead of time, you can ensure that when you do sit down to write, you’ll have something dramatic to say. This simple change in your writing habits can help you write more and stress less.
But first, let’s analyze what you’re trying to construct when you write a screenplay. It’s not a nebulous, monumental, or overwhelming task.
It’s just producing 115 written pages—with not that much writing on each page, at that.

Outlining Your Screenplay

Let’s start by mapping that simple and unintimidating reality out on a single page, starting with your screenplay’s page 1 (an opening that hooks the audience) and ending with its page 115 (that satisfies their expectations of good storytelling):

Page 1

Act 1: Compelling beginning (Hook), dragging your audience into the midst of action.

Page 5

End of introduction of the protagonist.

Note: Make him relatable to the audience. A protagonist is convincing when all of the following four dimensions of his or her makeup are clearly focused:

1. His motivation
2. His mission in the story
3. The obstacles he faces in pursuing his mission
4. The change he undergoes from the beginning the story to the end.

Introduction of your story’s theme (emotional mood and viewpoint of the film).

Page 20

End of introduction of antagonist.

Note: Make the antagonist worthy of your protagonist. The stronger the antagonist, the stronger your protagonist will look.

Major event launches your character into action, (inciting incident also called the inciting event) into Act 2.

Act 2: Rising and falling action (not just action, dramatic action), plot twists and turns, obstacles to his mission—constantly keeping the audience in suspense, and surprising them.

It helps to break up your dramatic action into three acts within Act 2.

Page 35

First meaningful encounter between protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist succeeds or fails to advance his or her cause.

Page 50

Turning point:  New information, or the triumph over a major obstacle, turns everything 180 degrees.

Page 70

Twist & turn: Build to a climax. Darkest moment for hero. At the crossroads. Will he win or lose?

Page 85

Act 3: Protagonist at lowest point. Begin resolution as character breaks through with a final decision.

Page 95

The story draws to a dramatic close, underlying its theme or moral impact.

Page 115

Mission accomplished, Change occurs. Conclusive ending that satisfies the audience and sharpens their mood as they leave the movie. Answering the question, what was this story about?

Using Final Draft to Write Your Screenplay

It helps to have an idea of how many pages you type an hour in Final Draft. That way you can budget time accordingly.

For example, if you can type five pages an hour and can allocate two hours a day on weekdays (take weekends off to recharge your batteries and let the story build up pressure in your mind), that means you’ll be able to produce 10 pages per day or 50 pages per week. At that rate, it will take you exactly 12 work days (allowing 2 days for those last 15 pages). A total of 24 hours of actual writing.
My advice is to schedule the same time to write each morning or evening, and stick to it religiously, not stopping until you’ve spent the time you’ve allocated—let’s say two hours on the stopwatch.

7 Steps to Prepare Your Story for Writing

Before you sit down to “fill in the blanks,” prepare yourself by making sure you’re ready with the following items:

1. You’ll need to start with a story that’s well-worked out in your mind already, so I’m assuming you’re writing a screenplay based on your own book or unpublished story.
2. Read five of your favorite screenplays based on movies that did well at the box office. Consult www.boxofficemojo.com to make sure the ones you choose did well; and consult www.script-o-rama.com to download the screenplays free. Studying screenplays from successful movies can help you see what to do, and what not to do, when you write your screenplay.
3. You’ll need to create your screenplay in Final Draft, the professional standard of the Hollywood entertainment marketplace. So don’t set your start-clock until you’ve mastered the program; which shouldn’t take more than a few hours.
4. Unlike a novel or nonfiction book, a screenplay is nearly all action,and action consists of either physical action (she slams the door behind her; when she turns around he’s holding a gun) or active dialogue. The missing “nearly” part is narrative, simple and direct transitions from one action to another, setting the stage and clarifying the movement of the actors who are doing the action.
5. This means all you need for your screenplay is action, and you start by asking yourself what are the obligatory actions of your story, the actions without which the story makes no sense. Those are the ones you use to fill in the blanks, above, estimating where they should come in the story.
6. If you need help deciding what goes where in the story, reduce all the most important actions, whether they’re physical or verbal, to a single 3×5 card for each.  Make all the cards you’ll need for your screenplay, and I can tell you from experience that you’ll rarely need more than 100. When you’ve finished the cards, sort them in terms of where in the story they should go. Then re-sort them with the power of hindsight (gained from doing the first sorting). Now you should be ready to list the obligatory actions in the page outline, above.
7. Spend as much time as you need to fill in the page spread until it has a clearly visible through-line. That’s another way of saying “the story flows.” Here’s a tip from one of my books that helps you assess the intensity-level of the various moments in your story so you can rearrange them to make sure you’ve built a rollercoaster of rising and falling action:

This chart is easily constructed:

1. Summarize action in a few words.
2. With a single hyphen for each degree of intensity, rate each action, ending with an arrow after each action’s line.
3. Draw a line from one arrowhead to another. That gives you a graph of rising and falling action.
4. Turn the graph on its side to see whether the rollercoaster is dramatically effective enough. In this example, the story could use more dramatic variation between Act 1 and Act 2, and especially in Act 3 where falling action needs to be enhanced to make the rising action more compelling to the audience.
5. Now’s your chance to vary the scenes to make for a more satisfactory rollercoaster ride.

Once you’ve done all that, you should be ready to finish filling out the page spread, if you haven’t done it already.

When You Sit Down to Write, Everything Should be Prepared

Once your page spread is filled out, you’re ready to start your clock on the actual “writing.” But note that you now already know what you’re going to write, so it’s time to sit down and just do it.

At this point you should have such a clear idea of where your story is going it should be a lot easier to write your screenplay than if you were simply sitting down and writing a brand new story from a blank page.

One more practical tip: get a ream of paper ready for use. Five hundred blank pages are way more than enough to write a screenplay with plenty of waste allowed along the way. But at least you know as you stare at your ream that it’s not an insuperable, monumental, mountainous task. It’s just filling out as much of that ream as your story needs.

Time to sit down at the computer and type, following your page spread outline and aided by the cards on which you’ve recorded the details of each action required to tell the story.

Don’t worry about transitions between one action and another, and definitely don’t worry about “CUT TO,” “FADE OUT,” etc. Directors reading your script will only be annoyed by your attempt to dictate to them how to use the camera.
Just tell your story without telling us about it—just showing it.

No stopping to worry about research, spelling, or even grammar—that can all be checked automatically by Final Draft when you’ve gotten the draft down. You do that checking on Work Day #12.

Now all you have to do is revise (including checking your research). Give yourself at least as much time for that as you did for your first draft. Then send it out for a “friendly read,” and revise accordingly.

Good luck.

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