Dennis Palumbo, MFT, is a writer and licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues. This is from an interview for Shrink Rap Radio:

Initially, when you start writing, or at least when I started writing, you think the reward is, wow! It’ll be so great to see my words on screen, to see my name on screen…

I think what happens over time when, because you’re a writer – especially once I became a screenwriter – you’re very powerless as a screenwriter.

And what happens – and it’s a subtle change, but I think it’s the one that most mature writers go through – is the gratification becomes personal… the process of writing becomes its own reward… you tell the story the way you want to tell the story, and then hope for the best…

The frustration, I think, boils down to the fact that I believe screenwriters are the most crucial aspect of a movie, and they’re the ones with the least power and the least control.

Continued in article Therapist to the Hollywood Stars.

NOTE - The TeleSummit is over but you can still purchase recordings of the sessions.

Eric Maisel - Author, Creativity Coach and Co-Founder of TeleSummits.com
John Dillon & Vivian Nesbitt - hosts and moderators

September 4th through September 7th, 2008. 24 great sessions. 6 one-hour sessions over four days, conveniently scheduled to suit your needs whether you live on the East Coast, the West Coast, or anywhere in between. (And if you live elsewhere in the world: all sessions are recorded!)

Presentations:

* The Odyssey of the First Novel
* The Odyssey of the Memoir
* Writing and Selling the Romance Novel
* Writing and Selling the Contemporary Novel
* Writing and Selling the Mystery Series
* Writing and Selling the Children’s Book
* Writing and Selling the Nonfiction Book
* Writing and Selling the Interview Book
* Writing and Selling the Self-Help Book
* Writing and Selling the Illustrated Book
* Writing and Selling the Travel Memoir
* Writing and Selling the Nature Book
* Writing for the Niche Market
* How to Turn Your Expertise into a Bestselling Book
* The Fundamentals of Screenwriting
* The Art of the Spiritual Book
* The Nonfiction Collaboration
* Literary Agent Basics
* Finding the Right Literary Agent
* What Editors Want
* How to Handle Rejection
* Book Publicity Basics
* Branding, Positioning, and Self-Promoting
* Internet Strategies for Writers

From essay: Let me entertain you, By Michael Chabon

Entertainment has come to mean junk. But its definition also should include everything pleasurable that arises from an encounter with literature.

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights.

It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a “Street Fighter” machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade.

Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation.

It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs.

Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.

But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.

The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.

From longer essay: Let me entertain you, By Michael Chabon, LA Times

Excerpted from his book Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands [image].

Diablo Cody’s script Juno earned her an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In some interviews and her own writing before the Oscar win, she talked about keeping her work real.

From Diablo Cody’s Tips for Blogging Your Way to Hollywood Success, By John Scott Lewinski, Wired magazine site:

“One of my teachers told me that I was lazy,” Cody explained. “He said, ‘I think you’re the best writer I’ve ever taught. But I’ll never hear from you again because you have no ambition.’

“I never intended to get my writing out there. I always thought of published writers as honor roll students — the real overachiever types. I never intended my work as a springboard to anything else. I write because I’m addicted to it. It’s my confessional.”

Continue reading »

A newsletter from The Writers Store exclaims, “It’s over! The 100-Day Writers Strike has officially ended, with 92.5% of WGA members voting to return to work.

“The business of show business will once again run full steam ahead! The spec script market is anticipating another mid 90’s-style boom, as agents and producers gear up to start taking meetings and television shows scurry to re-staff.

“So what can all this mean for you? Whether you’re a guild member or you’re just starting out as a writer, this is a sizzling new era to take control of your career, and capitalize on the renewed creative energy coursing through Hollywood.”

Continued in article Ways to Get Back on Track Post-Strike.

[Image from The Writer's Mind CD]

Depression hit Rowling when her first marriage to a television journalist broke down after just two years.

She had moved to Portugal to teach English and gave birth to her first daughter Jessica.

She said: “I’d had a short and quite catastrophic marriage. I had to get my baby back to Britain and re-build us a life and adrenaline kept me going.

“It was only when I came to rest it hit me what a complete mess I had made of my life. That hit me quite hard. We were as skint as you can be without being homeless and at that point I was definitely clinically depressed.

“That was characterized by a numbness, a coldness and an inability to believe you will feel happy again. All the color drained out of life.”

Continue reading »