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The Writer’s Playbook 2026: A Writer’s Life in the Waiting Room
This special session is for writers who are:
• Waiting on meetings, notes, attachments, or financing
• Wondering how to stay creative while projects stall
• Trying to build a sustainable writing career without burning out
• Looking for practical guidance from someone who’s spent decades producing films, publishing books, and helping stories reach the screen
How long can I wait?
Writers ask me that all the time, becoming impatient and anxious that their manuscript or screenplay is taking so long to get published or make it to the screen.My answer surprises them:
Don’t wait at all.
Waiting is a massive waste of time and can lead to depression and/or existential despair, and who knows what else. Write something while you wait. Plant another seed, cultivate it, and train it to grow straight. And while it’s taking its sweet time to bud and then bloom, do something else. Start a new spec script!
Back in my own “waiting room” in the sixties, I reviewed a great book by Barry Stevens: Don’t Push the River, It Flows by Itself. I translated Stevens’ Zen advice to Hollywood where every project has its own clock and will happen when and only when that clock reaches the appointed hour. Other than keeping that project on track the best you can by responding when asked to or when appropriate, there’s nothing much you can do—other than financing it yourself (a serious option, by the way) to speed up that project’s clock. By the nature of things, the project clock is invisible, which means extra frustration for the creator—unless you refuse to wait.
In 2015 I, and my dear producing partner Norman Stephens, produced a sweet little Christmas movie called Angels in the Snow. I had only been trying to get that movie produced for twenty years! I sold it to TNT once and came close to a deal at Hallmark another time. My client Steve Alten’s Meg after twenty-two years, finally premiered in 2018. What was I doing for the last twenty years? Writing twelve scripts and producing other films for television and cinema, managing hundreds of books, writing and publishing ten of my own, playing tennis, traveling, having a wonderful life. Not waiting.
Waiting makes writers neurotic. If I allowed myself to express my neurosis, as many writers have not yet learned not to do, I would drive those involved in making my or my clients’ stories into films crazy—and risk losing their support or return calls. The question I personally hate hearing the most, “What’s going on?” is one I have to force myself to refrain from asking. Your job, when it’s your turn to move your story forward, is to “get the ball out of your court” as efficiently, as well, and as soon as possible. Then, on that particular project, you have to wait for it to be returned to your court. Very few actual events requiring your help occur along the way, leaving a huge gap of dead time in between them, like super novae separated by vast time years of space. But it’s not dead time if you use it for something else creative.
If the glacial pace of the Hollywood creative business fills you with dread, you’re in the wrong business or you’re dealing with it the wrong way. Don’t wait. Do. As the great photographer Ansel Adams put it: “Start doing more. It’ll get rid of all those moods you’re having.”
psychologist Daniel Rinaldi, into yet another high-stakes investigation. What begins as a random act of violence quickly spirals into something far more calculated—and far more dangerous. The killer isn’t finished. And this time, Rinaldi may find himself not just analyzing trauma, but living it… squarely in a sniper’s crosshairs.
As a licensed psychotherapist, Palumbo brings a rare level of authenticity to his characters. In the interview, we unpack one of the most compelling themes in his work: the difference between guilt and shame.