Tuesday Links… 8/3

Holy crapper.  Today at 4 o’clock, we’ll be signing the loan documents to purchase our first house.  Dah!

Anyway, here is this week’s collection of Tuesday links.   Hope you enjoy.

Watch this incredible mash-up video, incorporating both the trailers for Inception and Pixar’s Up.  It’s entitled “Upception”.

Martin Scorcese explains the difference between plot and story.

Screenwriter John August discusses how to cope when the work you put your heart and soul into isn’t as well recepted as you had hoped.

I’ve got to make time this week to read the script for Casablanca and go through Go Into The Story’s write-up analyzing the script.

Tuesday Links… 6/29

Here are this week’s collection of cool links that I’ve come across over the last seven days.

* The 99% writes a post on hard work and if it’s really worth anything.

* Julie Gray put together “The Writerly Survival Tool“, with helpful links for any new or even established screenwriter.

* Screenwriter Phillip Barron has a great response to those aspiring writers who make a habit of complaining that the business isn’t fair.

* Go Into The Story explains how writing while uncomfortable can help stimulate creativity in one of their “Dumb Little Writing Tips That Work” segments.

* Speaking of Go Into The Story, we’re now up to part 5 of Scott’s “How I Write A Script” piece.

* Script Collector has put up a grip of new scripts for download lately, including Toy Story 3, Knight and Day, and Killers.

* Designer Andrew Salituri has created some really cool prints as part of his “The Infinite Good” project, which is meant to help raise awareness of positive things happening in the world after he discovered the significant decrease in Malaria cases while on his recent trip to Malawi.

Hugh MacLeod’s “Ignore Everybody”

Okay, it seems like I’ve been on Hugh MacLeod’s jock lately, but I’ve been planning on putting this post up for a month and am now just getting around to it.

A few weeks ago, I read Hugh MacLeod’s book, Ignore Everybody, which features 39 keys to creativity.  For anybody interested in pursuing any type of creative activity, whether for professional or pleasure (or both) purposes, I highly recommend you pick the book up.

Now, the book can pretty much be summed up by simply saying, “Ignore what everybody else thinks, shut up, and put time in on your craft,” but breaking the information into forty steps makes it easier to digest and is thus more inspiring… feels more manageable.

Although you need to buy the book (Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity) to read more details for each creative key, you can hit the jump to at least read down the list of keys.

Read more →

Tuesday Links

I’ve gathered a couple of links that I’ve found in my ventures online over the last couple of days that I’m hoping will help or inspire you as much as they did me.

The 99 Percent wrote a post on the “10 Laws of Productivity,” meant to encourage creative types to actually get stuff done.

Author Jane Friedman put together a list of the “Best Articles Writers Should Have Read” so far in 2010.

Screenwriter John August discusses the “Bechdel” test, which was originally put together by cartoonist Alison Bechdel to express the overall lack of real female presence in film.

It appears that Mystery Man, an individual who had a huge presence in the screenwriting online world and provided loads of inspiration and education about screenwriting, yet remained personally anonymous, has passed away.  Read more about it at Go Into The Story.

I love this cartoon by Hugh McLeod, which he put together to be on the back of a friend’s business card.

If you haven’t seen these images from AP photographer Charlie Ridel which display the horrible impact from BP’s recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, check them out at Kitsune Noir’s site.

Waiting is killing me

I hope that the people over at Creative Screenwriting are saving their pennies to pay for my upcoming health bills, because sitting here waiting for the notification of the top three finalists in their 2010 Spring Cyberspace Open is killing me. 

Every time an email comes through I get sick to my stomach and my heart starts pounding, until I see that it’s just a newsletter email from Barnes & Noble or spam mail trying to get me to buy Viagra.

If I knew how to smoke weed, I would so be toking up right now.

So yeah, no word yet.  I’m trying my best to stay busy and keep my mind off it by doing laundry and eating as much as possible.

Until I hear anything, I’ll leave you with some goodies I’ve recently come across that may interest you:

Scriptshadow has some new scripts up for download, including: 

1)  The Tomb (draft is titled Exit Plan), which is rumored to possibly feature Bruce Willis,

2) Selma, which is written by Paul Webb, will be the next release from Precious director Lee Daniels and is going to star Liam Neeson, Hugh Jackman, and Robert De Niro, and

3) Premum Rush, written by king of the screenwriting world lately, David Koepp.

You can click on the title of each to download the script.

Rock ‘N’ Roll

Art by Marc Johns

It’s been a ridiculously awesome couple of days.

I’ll keep it short and sweet.

* I successively submitted my super hero script, entitled Super Ted, to the Nicholl Fellowship, the Silver Screenwriting Competition, and Script P.I.M.P.

* I attended Julie Gray’s writing workshop entitled “Idea to the Page to the Screen.”  The best way to sum up the experience is to compare it to back when I was trying to improve as a basketball player in college.  You can bust your butt doing individual work, practicing and improving your skills, but there’s nothing like going against up to head to head competition. 

I’ve improved because of the work I’ve put in on screenwriting, but when I shared my script and was put to the test up against much more experienced writers, I drove the lane with confidence only to get my shit swatted.  Julie and the group consistently challenged me and made me work, so while it was somewhat of an uncomfortable experience since I was thrown outside of my comfort zone, I came out of it with a much better knowledge of where I need to go from here.  She’ll be teaching a couple more workshops around the country, and I highly recommend signing up if she teaches around you.

* My Brother Mick, the script I completed last year, made it as a quarterfinalist in Script Doctor Eric’s Screenwriting Competition.  Semifinalists will be named on May 10th and the finalists on May 15th.

* I was able to catch a couple movies yesterday, including 1952′s High Noon (wow, great flick) and last month’s Death at a Funeral (so far wins my vote for the worst movie of the year).

I took yesterday completely off to get some sleep and let my brain take a much needed break.  Today I spent time organizing how I’m going to spend the next month, laying out goals and deadlines of things I want to get done by June 1st.

Script Night

Sunday evening.  You know that you don’t have anything better to do.  Tape The Pacific and instead take part in the new script reading group through Script Chat.

On the first Sunday of every month, the group will get together on twitter to discuss a specific script.

- why it might have sold

- what worked/didn’t work for you

- if you were a reader, what would have given it a pass or consider

- what worked better, the film or the script

- if the script was better than the film, where did it go wrong 

- justify changes between the script and the finished film… which will help us all better understand the development process.

First night will be May 2nd at 8 pm EST, where they’ll be discussing Adaptation.  To read more about Script Night and to download Adaptation, go here.

“Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” from Will Self

“Ten rules for writing fiction,” from Will Self, taken from The Guardian.

1 Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . .

2 The edit.

3 Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

4 Stop reading fiction – it’s all lies anyway, and it doesn’t have anything to tell you that you don’t know already (assuming, that is, you’ve read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven’t you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).

5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

6 Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is ­indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

7 By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you’re writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: “Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . .”

8 The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.

9 Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.

10 Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Colm Toibin’s “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction”

Out of all authors’ responses from The Guardian’s, Ten rules for writing fiction piece, Colm Tóibín’s responses are by far my favorite.

Reading through all of the answers from the array of writers has been interesting, as there’s not really one thing in common in how they work except that they make it a priority and are writing all of the time.

His collection of rules can pretty much be summed up by saying, “Stop thinking about it so much and just do it as much as you can.”

1 Finish everything you start.

2 Get on with it.

3 Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.

4 Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

5 No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.

6 Work in the morning, a short break for lunch, work in the afternoon and then watch the six o’clock news and then go back to work until bed-time. Before bed, listen to Schubert, preferably some songs.

7 If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.

8 On Saturdays, you can watch an old Bergman film, preferably Persona or Autumn Sonata.

9 No going to London.

10 No going anywhere else either.

30 Days by Phillip Baron

If you’re looking for someone to crack you up while reading and learning about screenwriting, look no further than Phillip Baron.

Here’s his latest entry from his blog, The Jobbing Scriptwriter, in which Phillip describes what happens when he’s given a 30 day deadline to finish a project.