Story Merchant E-Book Deal - Sell Your Story to Hollywood $.99

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.⁠⁠

 AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

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
Sign up for Brian’s free Writer’s Digest eNewsletter: WD Newsletter
Listen to Brian on: The Writer’s Market Podcast

FILM COURAGE: Sell Your Story To Hollywood: Writer's Guide To Show Business - Dr. Ken Atchity [FULL INTERVIEW]

 

Available on Amazon

The #1 Writer's Pocket Guide to the Business of Show Business by Kenneth Atchity.

⁠

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. ⁠

Work 1 on 1 with Story Merchant CEO, Hollywood producer, and author Dr. Ken Atchity.

Sign up Today at Writers Lifeline

Story Merchant E-Book Deal Ken Atchity's Sell Your Story to Hollywood $.99!

Available on Amazon

The #1 Writer's Pocket Guide to the Business of Show Business by Kenneth Atchity.

⁠

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. ⁠

Maren R, Reviewer

Full of information but still easy to read! If you want to start screen writing -even if it snot the rather lofty goal of becoming a Hollywood writer- this book will tell you how you could actually manage it!


Cristie U, Reviewer

This is a helpful and honest guide as to how to get your book made into a movie or tv show. It seems like it would be easier now because of the internet, but the author points out how difficult it still is and how to ensure your book gets into the right hands.


Terri D, Reviewer

Sell Your Story to Hollywood is a quick guide to getting your story into the hands of those who make things happen in Hollywood. The author Kenneth Atchity speaks from experience with decades working in Hollywood to get stories from the page to the screen. Although every guide about breaking into Hollywood should be viewed through the lens of how small the odds really are, this book starts out a bit discouraging for those who are truly interested in learning what they can do to move from a novel to a produced screenplay. The first step in getting this done, according to this book? Have an international bestseller. Okay. Not everyone can do that. Step 2: get reviewed by the NYT or other prestigious publication. Um... if a writer had that, they probably wouldn't need this book. While some of these initial steps are not quite what you would consider actionable advice for getting your screenplay produced, the book does move toward more actionable steps that you can take, though the guide does assume that you have a great story to tell with either an impeccably written novel or screenplay. As a writer with scripts but no connections to the industry, the parts of this book that I found most helpful were actual Appendix B and Appendix C. Writers at any stage can probably find something useful to take away from this guide to use in pursuing their own Hollywood career.

Reviewer 428382

Informative and well written, this is a guide that ever writer should read. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot. 


pamula f, Reviewer

Hollywood buys stories all of the time. Sometimes they buy a story that started out as a small article in a hometown newspaper. This book will show you how to get your writing out there for the world to see.

Steven M, Reviewer

I’ve recently completed a screen writing course and was delighted to have been approved for this ARC. The author clearly knows his stuff and offers an insight into the world of scriptwriting for movies. A perfect introduction to a world that some of us can only dream of.


Librarian 121315

Have you ever watched a movie and thought to yourself that you can come up with a better story? Or have you ever been inspired by a movie to tell a story of you own? For either of those cases, this is one of the books that you must read. I said one of the books because there are other books that can also stir you in the right direction; nevertheless, this book will certainly give you a good start. I loved that the author offers real life examples of movies that we have heard or watched before making the book’s contents more relatable to the readers. This is a great introduction to the business of movie making and readers should feel more comfortable with this subject after studying this book.

Writers Lifeline: Hollywood High Concept

Studios today are producing, for the most part, two kinds of films. One type is pre-established franchises (comic books, TV series, famous novels, toys, such as Star Wars, Captain America, and The Hunger Games. The other type is high-concept scripts that are either conceived of in-house by executives, producers, managers, and agents who know what the market responds to — or by “spec” screenwriters determined to break the bank.

Writing even the greatest screenplay that isn’t high concept is choosing either the indie path or willful self-indulgence.

Dealing with “high concept” is one of the most challenging and frustrating tasks of the Hollywood writer, agent, or producer; reducing the story to a compelling logline is what high concept is all about. As a former academic not prepared for a world focused on marketing, it took me years to realize that the term “high concept” means almost its opposite. It means “simple concept,” as in Fatal Attraction: An innocent smile at a party turns a married man’s life upside down and put his family in mortal jeopardy.

Sometimes a title is its own high concept, as with Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel Gone with the Wind, the extended logline of which would be: “Against the backdrop of the great Civil War, a narcissistic Southern beauty obsessed with idyllic love struggles to reconstruct her life and finds that her true love is closer than she thinks.”

High concept is a story that will compel the broadest audiences to watch the movie after hearing a pitch of only a few, or sometimes even one, word(s):

Psycho

Sleepless in Seattle

Armageddon

Unwanted Attentions

Vertigo

Jaws

How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days

American Sniper

Unfaithful

Four Weddings and a Funeral

San Andreas

Black Hawk Down

Panic Room

Selma

Runaway Bride

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead

Home Alone

Cabin Fever

Die Hard

Ex Machina

These examples of high concept are pitched by their very titles. It’s enough to hear the title—and know that Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson star—to compel audiences to the box office for Anger Management. 

“Die Hard on a boat,” was allegedly the logline line that led to the sale of Steven Seagall’s Under Siege.

Titles like The Fisher King, Seven Days in May, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Shipping News may be evocative, but do not express a high concept that will instantly lure audiences. Though such titles may get lucky and become successful movies, in today’s blockbuster market they’d be swimming upstream.

Nothing is more important to marketing your story than a “high concept logline” that makes it immediately stand out from all those stories that are subtle, nuanced, and difficult to pitch, and that depend entirely upon “execution.” Here are some more examples that have led my companies or others to sales:

• “Jurassic Shark!” (the two-word description given AEI client Steve Alten’s Meg by ICM-agent Jeff Robinov, who spearheaded a “preempt” from Disney for $1.1 million; the story was then re-sold to Newline, and then to Warner Brothers)

• When the most obnoxious guy in the world realizes he’s become an asshole on a false premise, he makes a list of all the people he’s wronged and sets out to repay them one by one. (John Scott Shepherd’s Henry’s List of Wrongs, sold to New Line Pictures for $1.6 million).

• Life or Something Like It: An ambitious and self-involved reporter is sparked into action to change the pattern of her life when she interviews a street-psychic who tells her that her life is meaningless—and that she’s going to die—soon.

• The Madam’s Family: The true “Canal Street Brothel” story of three generations of madams and their battle against persecution by the FBI.

• The Lost Valentine: A man and woman find the love of their lifetimes when they’re brought together to memorialize the bittersweet story of a doomed World War II pilot and the wife who promised to wait forever for his return.

Consider these further examples, grouped by “genre”:

A woman or a family in jeopardy

The Shallows: While riding the waves at a remote beach, a young surfer finds herself injured and stranded just twenty miles from shore on a buoy—as a great white shark begins stalking her.

Room: After being abducted, abused, and imprisoned for seven years in a small windowless room a mother devises a bold escape plan.

An ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances

The Danish Girl: What happens if the husband you adore needs to be a woman?

Woman in Gold: Six decades after World War II, a Jewish octogenarian begins a quest to reclaim the artwork confiscated from her family by the Nazis and now proudly celebrated by the Austrian government—including a famed Gustav Klimt masterpiece.

Men on a mission

Saving Private Ryan: US soldiers try to save their comrade who’s stationed behind enemy lines.

Bridge of Spies: At the height of the Cold War in 1960, the downing of an American spy plane and the pilot’s subsequent capture by the Soviets draws Brooklyn attorney James Donovan into the middle of an intense effort to secure the aviator’s release.

Man against nature

The Martian: He was left behind—on Mars.

The Revenant: A frontiersman fights for survival after being mauled by a grizzly and left for dead by his own hunting team.

Man or woman against the system

Spotlight: A Boston news team sets out to expose numerous cases of child molestation and cover up on the part of the local Catholic Archdiocese.

Concussion: A pathologist uncovers the truth about brain damage in football players who suffer repeated concussions and comes up against the corporate power of the NFL.

People Vs. Larry Flynt: A pornography publisher becomes the unlikely defender of free speech.

Class Action: A female attorney finds that her nemesis is her own father, and must choose between her corporate client and justice.

A woman escaping from something or someone she loves.

The Perfect Guy: After breaking up with her boyfriend, a professional woman gets involved with a man who seems almost too good to be true.

Enough: On the run from an abusive husband, a young mother begins to train herself to fight back.

Sleeping with the Enemy: A young woman fakes her own death in an attempt to escape her nightmarish marriage, but discovers it’s impossible to elude her controlling husband.

Filmmakers long to spot in our onslaught of daily email queries a high concept logline that makes a story out of universal—

• human emotions: fear, love, hate, envy, etc.
• deadly sins: anger, greed, lust, etc.
• plot motivators: betrayal, vengeance, discovery, rebirth, survival, etc.
• virtues: loyalty, faith, responsibility, etc.

—and embodies those elements in characters we can care about, relate to, and root for to shape an “original story” that feels both fresh and relevant to today’s global market.

If you can do that, and your writing effectively expresses your vision, you’re only steps away from recognition in the toughest story marketplace of all.

 

#FREE November 8 - November 12! Kenneth Atchity's "TELL YOUR STORY TO THE WORLD & SELL IT FOR MILLIONS"⁠

If there's a story distracting you during the day and keeping you awake at night, ask yourself: Is this a great story? If your answer is yes, then this is the book for you.

Learn from Ken Atchity and Lisa Cerasoli about how to write your own top-notch page-turner and then how to navigate the cutthroat publishing and entertainment business.

Read Tell Your Story to the World & Sell It for Millions Today: https://lnkd.in/grCsw2Xz

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.

Read more 

KEN ATCHITY: Never Give Up

What are the ingredients of a New York Times Best Seller? Ken Atchity has the answers and they are not what you expect. He is a movie producer, author of over 20 nonfiction books and novels. He has spent his lifetime helping writers get started and improve their careers. Writing was in his blood from the beginning. ‘I never understood writers’ block because I never had it,” he says.

What is the right mindset for being successful as a self-published writer?

It’s about what Winston Churchill said: “Never give, never give, never give up!” Don’t doubt yourself, keep working and learning more about your craft.

You wrote over 20 non-fiction books and novels. Are you still learning?

Yes, I am. I am always learning. I love writing because it’s a way of focusing your learning. I write the book first, then I do the research and spend years revising the book.

Some writers confessed that they don’t read books when they work on something new…

While you write your first draft, there is no need for you to read something else.The time to start reading other things is after you’ve finished it and improved it. You can always study yourself to death and never finish the first draft. And that’s the danger of it, or being influenced by other voices. It is much better to get your voice clear in the first draft and then give yourself a limited amount of time to do further research to make sure things are accurate. You would be surprised how often your imagination gets things pretty much right.

What do you appreciate most in a book?

I love books that take you to another world and keep you there the whole time. A storyteller who knows his craft will do this by not making a single mistake. A mistake is something that takes you suddenly out of that world.

You helped several authors to make the New York Times Best Sellers list. What are the ingredients of a bestseller?

That list is a victim of the changing times we are living now. In today’s world, a person needs to be famous or write about someone who is. The most recent three NY Times Best Sellers were about John Kennedy. But this list is not the only judge. Selling books on the Internet is a direct and immediate way to see if you could find an audience for your book.

Read more

Dealing With Your Type-C Personality: Time⁠ and Work

Learn more about One-on-one coaching to help understand a Type-C personality and equip you with practical tools to make yourself more productive and less frustrated with storytelling.⁠

⁠

Learn more at www.thewriterslifeline.com

Getting Your Story Straight: Setting

Chapter 4 – Setting

⁠
Professional coaching tips to help you figure out point of view, structure, and master all the elements of story.⁠  
⁠
Learn more: http://www.thewriterslifeline.com/

Getting Your Story Straight: Heroes

Welcome to "Getting Your Story Straight" series on Instagram @storymerchant. 

Professional coaching tips to help you figure out point of view, structure, and master all the elements of story. If you'd like more details or enroll in one on one coaching to perfect your story visit: http://www.thewriterslifeline.com/

Dealing with your Type-C Creative Mind

For all storytellers—novelists, screenwriters, journalists, nonfiction writers, and children’s book writers.

Sometimes the struggle to publish can drain even the strongest creative dynamo. Here's how to recharge your creativity, to keep your career going...and going...and going...




Learn More about One-on-ONe coaching to help understand a Type-C personality and equip you with practical tools to make yourself more productive and less frustrated with storytelling.

Getting Your Story Straight Series by Ken Atchity

Welcome to "Getting Your Story Straight" series on InstagramTV @storymerchant Getting Your Stories Straight Series by Ken Atchity. Professional coaching tips to help you figure out point of view, structure, and master all the elements of story.

Postscript (P.S.) Definition and Examples in Writing

A postscript is a brief message appended to the end of a letter (following the signature) or other text. A postscript is usually introduced by the letters P.S.

In certain types of business letters (in particular, sales promotion letters), postscripts are commonly used to make a final persuasive pitch or offer an additional incentive to a potential customer.

Etymology
From the Latin post scriptum, "written afterward"


read examples and observations here 

Writing Advice from Haruki Murakami

Write to find out.

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

Writing Advice from Haruki Murakami

Share your dreams.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

KEN ATCHITY: Never Give Up!

What are the ingredients of a New York Times Best Seller? Ken Atchity has the answers and they are not what you expect. He is a movie producer, author of over 20 nonfiction books and novels. He has spent his lifetime helping writers get started and improve their careers. Writing was in his blood from the beginning. ‘I never understood writers’ block because I never had it,” he says.

What is the right mindset for being successful as a self-published writer?

It’s about what Winston Churchill said: “Never give, never give, never give up!” Don’t doubt yourself, keep working and learning more about your craft.

You wrote over 20 non-fiction books and novels. Are you still learning?

Yes, I am. I am always learning. I love writing because it’s a way of focusing your learning. I write the book first, then I do the research and spend years revising the book.

Some writers confessed that they don’t read books when they work on something new…

While you write your first draft, there is no need for you to read something else.The time to start reading other things is after you’ve finished it and improved it. You can always study yourself to death and never finish the first draft. And that’s the danger of it, or being influenced by other voices. It is much better to get your voice clear in the first draft and then give yourself a limited amount of time to do further research to make sure things are accurate. You would be surprised how often your imagination gets things pretty much right.

What do you appreciate most in a book?

I love books that take you to another world and keep you there the whole time. A storyteller who knows his craft will do this by not making a single mistake. A mistake is something that takes you suddenly out of that world.

You helped several authors to make the New York Times Best Sellers list. What are the ingredients of a bestseller?

That list is a victim of the changing times we are living now. In today’s world, a person needs to be famous or write about someone who is. The most recent three NY Times Best Sellers were about John Kennedy. But this list is not the only judge. Selling books on the Internet is a direct and immediate way to see if you could find an audience for your book.

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This is dedicated to the one I love

I thought I’d reprint Gary Wenkle Smith’s “Dedication” page as a great example of the evolving relationship between an author and his faithful “tough-coach” editor, in this case his wife, Pat Rearic Smith! May everyone evolve in this direction.

DEDICATION

To quote a song from my generation: “This is dedicated to the one I love.”

My wife, Pat Rearic Smith, has been my best friend, lover and wife for forty-six years. It hasn’t been easy being married to me, I assure you. Not all have been blissful years, and I am responsible for most of the unpleasantness. Yet, the good times have put those other days in the distant fog, and we have a great life today, without remorse or recriminations.

During these past several years while I have become serious about my writings, she has been the one person who has steadfastly stuck with me. She has been unbending in her desire to guide me past my many faults, as a writer and a man. When I tried to mold myself into the stories I wished to tell, she removed the frill and repetition written by someone who really hadn’t a clue about half the time. When I did know what I was doing, I still needed to ask her to help me do it much more simply.

Having trained to write as a lawyer made writing for enjoyment an onerous task. Lawyer’s are repetitive in our legal briefs. We are taught: tell them what you are going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you have told them. The best legal story tellers repeat themselves with eloquence.
My first editing with Pat was a war. I had asked her to help me with The Last Midnight, my first published novel. Then I rejected her many suggestions to the point of turning her away. After begging her to give me a second chance, I wasn’t much better at accepting her proposals that I give up significant amounts of my writing and live without it. I remember feeling betrayed at her intimation that she declared such a large amount of my precious words unworthy of publication. I confess to being burdensome and defensive.

I praise her for her amazing patience, and love. She has stuck with me in editing all that I have written. She can take long paragraphs I have labored over for hours and turn them into three sentences that say everything I was trying to convey. She can read an entire novel in a few days and make all the necessary corrections. It took a while, but now I don’t ask that she edit it so that I can see what she has changed. I accept her work without question and move forward with completion of whatever I have in progress.

So, to you my dear, love of my life, best friend, my Woman-Girl, I thank you for staying with a guy like me. I am truly grateful.

The E-book as a Starting Point to Print Publishing? - article

Many authors see an e-book as a starting place for their publishing dreams. Their ultimate goal is to publish their book as a print book. This is certainly possible, as illustrated by the story of Amanda Hocking’s self-published e-books that caught fire through the following she built through her platform of networked blogs. Her efforts ultimately led to sales of over a million dollars and then to a traditional publishing contract.

Other authors have also found their way from e-book to print success. Author Victorine E. Lieske e-published and found her way onto the New York Times Best Sellers list with her suspense romances. She now offers paperback covers of her novels on her website. Yet another success story is Aaron Patterson’s. He achieved a No. 1 Amazon Kindle Best Selling Book status with his e-Book and now also sells print books. For more success e-book stories, check out Novlr , a website dedicated to reading, writing, and Internet fiction. Generally, successful e-Book authors redistribute with indie-published print books.

Heady stuff, but don’t go crazy with excitement because only relatively few authors are achieving this kind of success. Proceed with the idea that you might succeed if you work hard, your content is excellent, and you educate yourself. There are a myriad of print-on-demand publishing (POD) options available to successful e-book authors.  Be aware that print options continue to evolve. Author Solutions has partnered with several traditional publishing companies to provide a hybrid-platform for self-published authors.

Finally, no one can guarantee that your book will be a hit. All publishing is a risk. The beauty of e-publishing is you have a chance to test the waters before trying paper copies. The low production costs and the ability to test the popularity of a book in the market helps self-published authors make informed decisions. Research the success stories. If your e-books achieve significant sales, educating yourself will put you a step ahead of the competition, if you should later decide to print books.

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by Molly Blaisdell

Write Your Novel to Be a Film by Kenneth Atchity

Novelists seeking representation complain that none of their books have been made into films. At any given moment, we have literally stacks of novels from New York publishers on our desks in Los Angeles. 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:

    “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.”

    “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. 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 about.”

    “The main character is 80, and speaks only Latvian.”

    “It’s set in Papago...in the 1960s, and is filled with long passages in Uto-Aztecan.”

    “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 useless 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 from the outset to make it appealing to filmmakers.

Give us a strong (preferably male) lead who, good or bad, is eminently relatable — and who’s in the “star age range” of 35-50 (where at any given moment 20 male stars reside; a star being a name that can set up the film by his attachment to it).

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).

Express your character’s personality in dialogue that distinguishes him, and makes him a role a star would die to play.

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


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 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 formless 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 $40 million. There is, from a business point of view, no comparison. Risking $40 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 finest publishers. Hollywood studies what audiences want by logging, 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.