Monthly archive: June, 2011

Interview With a Successful Writer: Novelist, Screenwriter Lee Goldberg

June 27, 2011, by 12 comments

Lee Goldberg has written everything from pulp thriller novels to feature film scripts to television shows — even the tie-in novels related to those television shows.

He’s a living counterpoint to those who contend that writers should focus exclusively on one kind of project, and to give you an idea of the range of his career, he’s even recently become an advocate for self-publishing ebooks (though he admits it’s not for everyone).

Lee Goldberg

Lee Goldberg, Mr. Versatility

He clearly possesses a lively entrepreneurial mind, and serves as a good example of the writer as marketer; he just launched a multi-author series of pulp/horror/mystery books aimed at the ebook market.

He’s also written scripts for the much-missed Spenser: For Hire TV series, wrote and produced the Diagnosis Murder TV series (for which he also wrote the tie-in novels), other TV shows, a feature film and several short films (you can read his own bio page here.)

His blog is active and informative, and he refuses to answer questions about his whereabouts during the Roswell Incident, which we frankly find suspicious.

Now to the interview…

Your Career

Q: You just launched a new multi-author pulp/horror/mystery book series titled The Dead Man. In terms of workflow, it appears to be an interesting mix of individual novels and TV-style group writing; how are you organizing multiple writers around one central character–and keeping everyone on track?

We have a private google group that we use to keep writers up-to-date on what everyone else is doing, stories in development, creative issues writers are having with their DEAD MAN tales, etc.

Q: Are you using any special tools to accomplish this? Version control, cloud, etc?

Only Google Groups and Dropbox.

Q: How many writers will you ultimately involve in the series? Are you acting as an editor?

We have a dozen now, My guess is that we might add three or four others, but I think the core group is likely to do more than one book each.

Q: Four Dead Man books are out (with a fifth on the way). Assuming this series was aimed primarily at the ebook market, can you tell us about the percentage of print vs digital sales of the series?

Right now, the majority of sales are in the ebook format… easily 95% or more.

Q: You’ve written tie-in novels for several series (Diagnosis Murder, Monk, etc); how hard is it to write a character who is seen every week on TV — one who is loved and studied by most of your readers? Read more →

Weekly Tweetfest

June 26, 2011, by No comments yet

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Mark Twain Goes Postal…

June 23, 2011, by 5 comments

Twain’s been called the “father of American literature” and he was damned funny to boot, and I’m happy to see the US Postal Service is issuing a stamp in his honor:

Mark Twain stamp
 
Twain’s not doing bad for a dead guy; he’s got his own website and a stamp…

What Screenwriters Can Teach You About Dealing With Your Copywriting Clients

June 22, 2011, by 5 comments

I spent a good chunk of yesterday working my way through a surprise deadline project, and at one point the client asked my why I’d rewritten a one-page pitch document to move the “peril” portion of the pitch right up front.

Do this for any length of time and you’ll come up against the same question, and — if you’re like me — struggle a bit to explain what’s better in terms the client can understand.

Phrases like “it’s more engaging” and “you need to involve them in the issue right away” are too vague.

Fortunately, my recent detour through video scriptwriting introduced me to a couple of good screenwriting blogs (here and here are now found on my RSS reader), and I found myself leveraging a screenwriting classic (which the client immediately grasped).

I simply invoked the three-act dramatic structure:
Act 1: Create the conflict
Act 2: Escalate the conflict
Act 3: Resolve the conflict (in our case, this is the call to action)

To someone who hasn’t spent a few years among the ‘persuasion by keyboard’ crowd, concepts like conflict, drama, friction and others are far more accessible — and apparently more convincing — than the “This worked better in an A/B test more than a decade ago” or even the last-gasp “trust me.”

Copywriters need to remain cognizant of useful old formulas like AIDA, but we have to talk to clients in language they understand (and appreciate).

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

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June 19, 2011, by No comments yet

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Interesting ‘Writer’s Block’ Quote Of The Day (so far):

June 18, 2011, by No comments yet

“You know who gets writer’s block? Non-writers. They think it’s cool and romantic to struggle to make Art. They make sure everyone knows how torturous the process is, so when they finally squeeze something out, it won’t be judged on its merits but rather the emotional anguish involved in its creation.”

“Writers write. Hacks Posers whine about how hard it is.”

—Screenwriter John August (at Johnaugust.com)

 

Another Creative Essential: The “Arty Bollocks” Generator

June 17, 2011, by 2 comments

Every creative person needs their own personal creative mission statement—an exploration of their artistic psyche so profound (and so pretentious), nobody can even come close to understanding it.

I used to rely on the pithy “Wretched, yet impertinent” as my creative vision statement, but may update it now that I’ve visited the Arty Bollocks Generator, which generates some seriously high class gibberish like:

My work explores the relationship between the body and midlife subcultures.

With influences as diverse as Blake and John Cage, new combinations are crafted from both explicit and implicit layers.

Ever since I was a student I have been fascinated by the theoretical limits of the mind. What starts out as hope soon becomes corroded into a tragedy of temptation, leaving only a sense of chaos and the prospect of a new synthesis.

As shifting forms become frozen through emergent and personal practice, the viewer is left with a statement of the limits of our condition.

If you don’t immediately fall in love with “leaving only a sense of chaos and the prospect of a new synthesis” then you’re simply not an artist.

Arty Bollocks Generator

Finally, automated pretension...

Keep visioning, Tom Chandler.

Unintentionally Amusing Social Media Blunder Of The Week (So Far)

June 16, 2011, by 2 comments

It used to be you fired an agency because they didn’t perform or you didn’t like the brand of muffins they served in meetings or the creative director had a ponytail or some other worthwhile reason.

Nowadays, you simply wait for the inevitable social media gaffe (via Ad Age):

In this case, the blunder was a public declaration denouncing negative reviews of client 2K’s “Duke Nukem Forever” game.

The now-deleted tweet was captured by Wired in a screenshot of from @TheRednerGroup that read: “too many went too far with their reviews. We r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom.”

James Redner, who had worked with the company since 2009 on various projects and who had most recently handled media relations for the launch of “Duke Nukem Forever,” has apologized for his actions numerous times on Twitter. He told Ad Age, “I used a public forum to voice my complaints and I know better. I poured my soul into the project and when I read the review I felt like a father trying to protect his son. In hindsight, I should have approached the writer directly.”

Social media has so few checks and balances—at least compared to more traditional media channels—that a continuous stream of entertaining marketing gaffes is almost guaranteed (in an attempt to provide even a glimpse of useful “how-to” content, I’ll simply offer the words “Hootsuite Pro” here).

In this case, not only did the tweet suggest a little less than perfect grace under fire, it also made public the common (but commonly denied) practice of witholding pre-release products from reviewers based on prior unfavorable reviews.

Oops.

And we’re not even going to explore the social media equivalent of “drunk dialing,” where you find yourself pouring out your scabbed-over heart on Facebook or Twitter while under the influence. (Do they make those “can’t start the car” breathalyzers for smartphones too?)

Or the inevitable autocorrect fails, where your phone out-thinks you, depriving you of your self-respect but providing the rest of us with a dose of humor at your expense.

Frankly, I’m all for screwups like this; so little in the social media universe (or on TV) offers entertainment anywhere near this compelling, especially for free.

Do I smell a reality TV series? (I think I do…)

Keep writing (but tweet with care), Tom Chandler.

PowerPoint: The Root All Evil, Or Simply The Cause of It?

June 14, 2011, by 4 comments

At times you have to wonder why so many big US corporations do so much evil (like almost bankrupting the global economy), and while sociologists compile pointless theories related to hubris and greed, I’ve determined the real cause of the problem:

PowerPoint.

(Stick with me on this one.)

Take a guy who is a normal, sincere human being, sit him in a conference room for three hours while someone carefully reads (out loud) every word on every copy-packed slide of a 50-slide presentation, and watch the rage simmer.

Cut him loose for lunch, and the guy who was only looking forward to a quiet hour in the park — where he’d feed the pigeons and smile at the attractive joggers — now stalks out of the meeting and begins foreclosure proceedings on Ghana.

Outbreaks of violence and civil strife in developing nations can be conclusively traced to the arrival of pirated copies of PowerPoint, and frankly, I can’t think of a better explanation for Donald Trump.

And every copywriter who has received a Russian-novel-length PowerPoint presentation with upwards of a dozen bullet points on every slide—and was told by some chirpy junior coordinator that it would “make a great home page—knows exactly what I mean.

While the above would constitute absolute proof in any peer-reviewed sociology journal, I’ll add one more piece of the puzzle.

The US House of Representatives is overrun with PowerPoint presentations.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

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June 12, 2011, by No comments yet

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Potentially Depressing Writing Quote of the Day

June 11, 2011, by 2 comments

In keeping with my prior “you can’t write if you’re happy” post:

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.”
-William Styron

Keep writing you neurotic bastards, Tom Chandler.

Why I Love Unbound (It’s another Crowdfunding site – and yet another headache for book publishers)

June 10, 2011, by 6 comments

Buying a book after it’s published is what we’ll define as “traditional” behavior, but the UK-based Unbound site offers a Kickstarter-esque route to publishing; if enough supporters throw down their hard-earned dollars (in some cases) on a project, it’s greenlit—and the author starts writing.

If a project doesn’t garner enough support, it dies (your money is refunded or pointed at another project).

Unbound

It’s yet another example of writers bypassing traditional publishing channels for less-controlling pastures, and between self-published ebooks, crowdfunding, blogs (some of which have taken the place of books), print-on-demand and similar technologies, publishers are probably wondering exactly how they acquired their karmic burden.

Then again, there’s little to prevent a publisher from launching their own version of Unbound or Kickstarter…

I Couldn’t Resist

I’ve long been a fan of Terry Jones (Monty Python, plenty of original projects since), so I supported the Terry Jones book project “Evil Machines.”

The Monty Python alumnus is not exactly an unknown figure, and in fact, most of Unbound’s authors will be high profile enough that pre-project funding probably isn’t needed.

Funding levels range from as little as 10 pounds (you silly brits and your weight-based currency) to funding an entire project.

More money buys you more goodies (I get an ebook and my name printed in the back of the book), though I suspect the real sales benefit is access to the Writer’s Shed, where Jones will post updates on the progress of his book (due in November).

I know better than to expect the odd peek over Jones’ shoulder (given that he wrote an entire play while naked, a peek might be enough), but I like a good science experiment as much as the next writer.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

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