Jean Shinoda Bolen on Greek mythology Author and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. explains the idea of archetype as a “predisposition that contributes to our personality, helping define our strengths, difficulties, and meaning.” She says the common forms “are based on the gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. People are complex, there is a [...]
Guillermo del Toro on the supranatural The film Pan’s Labyrinth was acclaimed for its powerful story and richly beautiful as well as terrifying images. Writer and director Guillermo del Toro once commented, “When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and [...]
Author Dani Shapiro quotes from the essay “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years” by Ted Solotaroff, in which he comments about so many talented writers disappearing. “It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself,” he wrote. “Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or [...]
For Japan’s cellphone novelists, proof of success is in the print One teenager who wrote a three-volume novel on her phone has gone on to sell more than 110,000 paperback copies, grossing more than $611,000 in sales. By Yuriko Nagano, Los Angeles Times Reporting from Tokyo Photo: “Bunny,” a 15-year-old cellphone novelist, tapped out a [...]
In his book Literature and the Brain, Professor Norman N. Holland details how we may respond so deeply in both creating and experiencing literature – novels, plays, poems, tv and movies – and the neuropsychology underlying our often intense engagement with stories and characters. See a video below. He writes of one iconic film: “The [...]
Her first book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, has sold more than a million copies in ten languages. In an interview, Natalie Goldberg talked about writing to access your energy and creative intuition : A writing practice is simply picking up a pen — a fast-writing pen, preferably, since the mind is [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A catastrophic marriage 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 [...]
At the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, “Lars and the Real Girl” received a standing ovation. Screenwriter Nancy Oliver was recently interviewed for the Los Angeles Times by Jeff Goldsmith, and expressed her perspectives on a number of challenges facing writers and other artists. Here is an excerpt: When Alan Ball offered you a staff writing [...]
The movie based on his story The Golden Compass is about to open. On his site, Philip Pullman addresses a number of questions about his life and work as a writer: Were you encouraged to be creative? No, I was ignored. When anyone took any notice it was to point out what a twit I [...]
Protecting your identity as an artist “The people who love their craft and see themselves as artists, and carry that identity through and study each day… are the people who thrive. … Successful people are able to sustain their identity as separate from their profession and what’s happening to them. That’s particularly important in the [...]
From actor to novelist Actor David Thewlis‘ films include Naked (1993), the Harry Potter series, and many more. His first novel, The Late Hector Kipling, has just been published, and screenwriter William Monahan interviewed Thewlis for a BlackBook magazine article [Fiction (With a Twist of Lennon)]. William Monahan: I find that when you’re writing a [...]
From stressed childhoods to great writers “The writers I know, or whose lives I have read about, have one thing in common: a stressed childhood. I don’t mean, necessarily, an unhappy one, but children who have been forced into self-awareness early, have had to learn how to watch the grown-ups, assess them, know what they [...]
“I think I was pushed in a way to write this book (“The Hundred Secret Senses”) by certain spirits in my life. They’ve always been there.. to kick me in the ass to write…. “I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule…. But ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, [...]
“My wife says that when I emerge from my office and declare that not only am I writing a bad book, I’m writing the worst book anyone has ever started, then she knows that I’m two-thirds of the way there.” Excerpts from article: With ‘Spook Country,’ William Gibson is still carving out his corner of [...]
Television’s got feature films beat “Each year hundreds of screenplays become feature films. And each year thousands of teleplays become television episodes. “Opportunity-wise, television’s got feature films beat. TV’s got the heat. The magic. The glitz. All that’s missing is you. How do you change that? It’s about YOU first and your talent and ability [...]
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