I get really inspired by reading articles or books about other writers, and to that effect, I want to do a plug for Dennis Brown's Shoptalk. I actually found this book five years ago, for sale on a sidewalk just outside of Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. - yet only started to read it recently. I couldn't put it down. It consists of interviews with playwrights/screenwriters, a producer - and Tennessee Williams' mother.
Brown has a true gift for drawing out writers of all personality types and getting them to talk about both the process of writing and the ups and downs of their careers. Granted, the book is mostly devoted to writing for the theater (and, since the book was published in the '90s, it's a theater from several decades back) - but most of the playwrights have also written for the screen in their careers; the two writing tracks do a lot of overlapping. Finally, even though the business world in the book is from a few decades ago, the insight into the writing process remains timeless.
At any rate, I just finished reading the book this morning, and definitely recommend it to all writers. It has greatly inspired me to write, write, and write some more. Now that my film course is almost at an end (we're now into film editing, with just two weeks of class to go!) I'm re-entering a very devoted writing phase, and am planning to churn out multiple scripts in the next few months. Who knows? Thanks to Shoptalk, one of those scripts may even be for the stage.
No comments:
Post a Comment