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 [...]
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 [...]
“Don’t worry about getting into the profession. Write anyway to make your soul grow. “That’s what the practice of any art is, it isn’t to make a living, it’s to make your soul grow.” From interview: Vonnegut on Fiction ~~ Larry Brody, writing for tv, writing ambition, writing resources
Being an amusing kid Amy Hempel has been creating short stories for more than twenty years. In a recent interview, she talked about some of her origins and personality as a writer. [The following is from the article "Hempel's short stories are long on finish" by Hillel Italie, Associated Press / Los Angeles Times, May [...]
“Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don’t want people to know. “White Oleander, for example, was so much about loneliness, and I was revealing something about myself. You have to work as deeply as you can to give the reader [...]
Her novel The End of Alice is “a tale told by a pedophile in his twenty-third year in a maximum security prison. He is intelligent; he is witty; he is profoundly dangerous. “Beyond the reality of his stark cell and the violent perversion of the other inmates lies his imagination, which he turns to his [...]
Random House: PURPLE HIBISCUS is your first novel. What inspired you to write this book? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: It came about organically and slowly; it was sparked by a mélange of things: my homesickness after first arriving in America to attend college (and the way I stubbornly romanticized my memories so that everything became fragrant—rain, [...]
Site author: Douglas Eby, M.A./Psychology, is a writer and researcher on the psychology of creative expression and personal growth, especially for high ability adults. He is publisher of the Talent Development Resources series of sites.
