Tony Bill’s Advice to Aspiring Screenwriters

1. Move to Los Angeles. That’s where you need to live to get your work read and known. No one is looking for you. You need to introduce yourself and your work in person somehow. It will undoubtedly happen by accident. Los Angeles is where the accidents happen.

2. People are not looking for a writer to “bring their ideas to fruition.” It’s your ideas that they will be interested in, combined with your unusually talented screenwriting ability (if that’s what it is). "Good" will not be good enough.

3. By definition, “freelance” means that you are on your own, without a steady salary or ongoing employment. If you can’t survive financially in that manner, it’s unlikely that you should pursue screenwriting. It’s the most difficult and competitive form of writing there is. That’s why really excellent screenwriters are in demand and handsomely paid in the movie business…and the rest are not.

4. You better start thinking less about movie screenplays and more about writing for television. The cost of making films, and the diminishing audience for them, has almost outlawed the original screenplay. Series TV — weekly or limited — is the place to be if you’re looking for employment. That’s also where the original, fresh, iconoclastic action is.

5. Just remember: Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about execution. West Wing without Aaron Sorkin is a political show. Deadwood without David Milch is a Western. Homicide without David Simon is a cop show. Gray’s Anatomy without Shonda Rhimes is a hospital show. And none of them would ever have seen the light of day without the genius of those writers. And, by the way…you have to be able to put it out there 26 times a year for at least 5 years, or it might not be worth doing in the first place.

6. Whatever you do…don’t read any “How-to-write-a-screenplay” books. Just read a bunch of great scripts and let it go at that. (And if you have to ask what a great one is, you’re in trouble already.)

Character is the Very Life of Fiction

Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody.

JOHN GARDNER

The Secret of Short-Story Writing

I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

O. HENRY

You Lay Out a Line of Words

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

ANNIE DILLARD

Vigorous Writing Is Concise

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

WILLIAM STRUNK, JR. and E.B. WHITE

You Get Ideas All the Time

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

NEIL GAIMAN

Keep Your Bones in Good Motion

Keep your bones in good motion, kid, and quietly consume and digest what is necessary. I think it is not so much important to build a literary thing as it is not to hurt things. I think it is important to be quiet and in love with park benches; solve whole areas of pain by walking across a rug.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI in a letter to John William Corrington (1963)

It's the Hardest Work There Is

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Writing Is Selection

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got.

JOHN McPHEE

Good Writing is Lean and Confident

Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.

WILLIAM ZINSSER