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Larry Brody on writing for TV

"Each year hundreds of screenplays become feature films. And each year thousands of teleplays become television episodes.

"Opportunity-wise, televisions’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?

"Well, first you’ve got to dedicate yourself to the Game. Accept the fact that TV is a personal business. It’s about YOU first and your talent and ability second.

"Your next step is to adopt the 'career' mindset. In television almost no one hits the jackpot with one script. In television we make a reputation for ourselves, amass credits and contacts, and get to a place where we can go to work everyday. Staff writing jobs are what TV is all about.

"Like most managers, TV execs want to work with people who are just like them. For many that means YOUNG. For almost as many that means NEW. But most of all it means you’ve got to be THEIR KIND OF PERSON.

"In all likelihood, you’re already leaning in that direction. It helps, though, to learn as much as you can about what captivates the hearts and minds of the execs, and, fortunately, it’s relatively easy to do so..."

Continued in article: Getting Started in L.A. - by Larry Brody
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Janet Fitch on using the deep parts in writing

"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 something worth reading, but you're also showing things about yourself that you're not pleased with.

"It's your flaws, not your strengths that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.

[HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE DARK PLACES YOUR CHARACTERS HAVE BEEN?]

"I've been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I'm an optimist. I've never been in that extreme a state, like my suicidal character Michael Faraday in Paint it Black. I have to tell myself, Life can be good, and I can get through this. This will pass."

Janet Fitch - from interview by Mary Curran-Hackett, Writer's Digest

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
article: Creativity and Depression, by Douglas Eby
Depression and Creativity section
depression relief: products / programs
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A.M. Homes on the emotional challenges of writing dark material

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 past, to an 'accident' with a little girl named Alice, and now to the erotic life of a nineteen-year-old suburban co-ed who draws him into a flirtatious epistolary exchange." [Summary from her site amhomesbooks.com]

A.M. Homes admits in an interview that "Alice" is "a profoundly disturbing book. It's a serious book, an upsetting book... Writing fiction, to me, means being inside other people's heads. But this head was so completely unfamiliar and dark...

"It was really, really hard. I remember feeling awful by the end of it. I was depressed and sad. I went into a bookstore to do some research, looking up stabbings and forensic reports, the details of these sorts of things, and I remember standing in the bookstore, literally crying."

She adds, "I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They're four or five years long - that's not so bad. They're serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who's not so crazy and peculiar and demanding." [From A. M. Homes Is a Big Fat Liar, by Dave Weich, Powells.com]

In an Elle magazine interview [Crimes of the Heart, by Randall Kenan], she responded to a question about people describing the novel as shocking: "It scared me sometimes when I was writing it; at times I had to stop—I frightened myself. I don't know that shock's such a bad thing... but I thought intellectually and artistically that this was the most ambitious book I'd tried."

Her new book is The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir

[Photo of Homes by Marion Ettlinger.]

Some actors also talk about being deeply and intimately engaged with a character, and how that can be dangerous for their mental health and equilibrium.

Nicole Kidman, for example, once commented, "Unfortunately the thing that makes me want to be an actor, in terms of wanting to be consumed, is also what can destroy you because it becomes almost too hard."

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
emotion: resources : articles books sites
emotional IQ resources : books sites/programs
nurturing mental health : writing
nurturing mental health: writing : articles books
nurturing mental health : sites / programs
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on writing

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, sand, insects, grass!), my interest in religion, the way history lives with us, my fascination with the kind of sweet-sour melancholy in some of my favorite books, Nigerian politics and how it trickles down to the personal.

By the way, it isn’t the first novel I wrote. There are manuscripts languishing in dusty drawers which were poorly conceived, to put it kindly.

Random House: Although Purple Hibiscus is not autobiographical, how much of your protagonist, Kambili, do you see in yourself?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Very little. Creating her as she is was very conscious. I was aware that I was dealing with huge, complex issues—religion, politics, history—that are easy to lapse into polemics about, and so I wanted a narrator who would be able to tell the story as unobtrusively as possible.

Kambili fitted well. She is not only young and sensitive, but she is also traumatized and that lends a kind of detachment to her telling.

She is voiceless in a way that I, thank Heavens, am not, but I think that hushed quality of hers serves this particular story well. I do sometimes see the careful way she observes her world in myself.

But I generally never model a major character after myself. I think that would stifle the creative spark; I need to be able to see my characters as being apart from me, creations that I can observe, because only then can I let them grow and free them to take risks and free myself to let them take those risks.

From Random House Author Q&A

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977.. and briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins.

Photo [by Avery Cunliffe] and bio from official site for her book Half of a Yellow Sun, a 2006 National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist [website].
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