What you learn writing movies helps you when you move to novels and what you pick up writing fiction proves you invaluable when you turn to nonfiction.
In the real world, no one is waiting to read what you have written…so what do you do:
- Streamline the message. Focus it and pare it down to its simplest, clearer and easier to understand form.
- Make it fun or sexy or interesting or scary or informative. Make it so compelling that a person would have to be crazy NOT to reads it.
The reader donates his time and attention and in exchange given them something valuable.
You should learn to ask yourself – is it interesting? Is it fun? Is the reader bored?
12. Come up with a CONCEPT
A concept takes a conventional claim and puts a SPINB on it. A concept established a frame of reference that is greater than the product itself.
A diet should have a concept.
An invasion of a foreign country should have a concept.
A salad should have a concept.
Games of throes, OITNB and the walking dead is a concept.
17. STEAL WITHOUT SHAME
“Kid, it ain’t stealing if you put a spin on it”
25. It’s okay not to be 100% PURE
28. MY DEMONS
I had not conception of Resistance in those days. I did not know that there existed inside my head an invisible, insidious, intractable, indefatigable force whose sole object was to keep me from doing my work, i.e. finishing the book I had been trying to write for seven years, – and ultimately to destroy me, physically, psychologically, and spiritually. All I knew was I couldn’t finish anything.
34. Getting over the HUMP
A real writing (or artist or entrepreneur) has something to give. She had lived enough and suffered enough and though deeply enough about her experiences to be able to process it into something that is of value to others, even if only as entertainment. A fake write is just trying to draw attention to himself.
Skipped 43-92.
94. A non-story is a story
Universal principal of storytelling:
- Every story must have a concept. It must put a unique and original spin, twist, or framing device upon the material.
- Every story must be about something. It must have a theme.
- Every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
- Must have a hero and a villain
- Every story must start with an Inciting Incident embedded within which is the story’s climax.
- Every story must ESCALATE through Act Two in terms of energy stakes complication and significance/meaning as it progresses.
- Every story must build to a climax centered around a clash between the hero and the villain that pays off everything that came before and that pays it off on-theme.
Before we do anything else, let’s decide what the story is about and CUT everything that is not on-theme.
102. the WRONG way to write a Self Help Book
- Introduce the Thesis (first 3 chapters)
- Cite examples supporting the theses (next hundred chapters)
- Recap and sump up wat you’ve presented so far (last 5 chapters)
103. the VOICE of Authority
Authority is critical in self-help since voice is prescribing something to us – a new mindset, a course of action- and urging us to change our life in accordance with the prescription.