Thursday, January 6, 2011

Changing things up

The start of a new year is a natural time to make some changes, so I'm going to do that. I've been writing this blog since early 2008, and it's been a great opportunity to put down in print a lot of principles that have crystallized for me in the course of my development as a writer. (That was my mission statement, after all.)

But as time goes by, I find I'm devoting less energy to learning and more to applying what I've learned. Principles occur to me less often, and exceptions to the principles I've already learned occur to me more often. As a result, when I sit down to write a post about some basic tenet of screenwriting, I usually end up putting it on the back burner or discarding it all together, because I've already started mentally poking holes in it. And thus I've ended up with a whole lot of unfinished mini-essays on all sorts of topics. I only published eight posts in all of 2010, but I probably started three times that many; I just couldn't quite bring them off.

So I think I'm done with the didactic stuff for the time being. (The post below was kind of my last hurrah in terms of passing on tips and lessons.) But I'm not done with this blog. To the contrary: I'd like to expand it to include a wider variety of topics on movies, TV, books, L.A., and entertainment in general. I'd like to write about some of these things without forcing myself to tie them directly to lessons about screenwriting.

Anyway, we'll see how that goes.

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