GUEST STORY: The Sky of Fire

I'm going to be honest. I think this is the best story Jason has written to date.

They lit the sky on fire. The planet was dying. They released chemicals into the atmosphere that were supposed to turn the pollution into clean air. It didn’t work. The sky is made of lead. It rains bullets. You would’ve thought we’d have learned our lesson, but we are worse now then ever.

I am certainly the last man alive. I am the lucky one, or the unlucky one depending on your point of view. I was testing a space suit beneath the manmade ocean when they ran their experiment. I lost all communications, and when I emerged from the bowels of the rapidly evaporating Cerulean Ocean, I was crushed with twice the amount of pressure than from the bottom of the sea, the planets new atmosphere. The space suit works like we hoped it would.

I immediately take shelter from the metallic storm, in the space test center where this suit was designed. No one else is alive. Dead bodies fill the rooms like Armageddon. They don’t even look like human beings anymore. An epiphany strikes me, and I sink to the bottom of my suit. Every living thing on the planet just died at the same moment less then an hour ago. Every bird plucked out of the sky in mid flight, every forest and every creature living inside every tree, every person I have ever known or ever loved. Dead. Although odors can’t pass through the vacuum that is my suit, I can still smell the death, and it makes me vomit.

You can read the rest by ordering it on Amazon for the Kindle, or by .PDF which will be emailed to you through the Paypal button below:

Anatomy of an Opening: The End of the Affair

Instead of breaking down a scene from a movie, this time we'll break down the opening of a book. (Previously, I've done scenes from City Lights, Citizen Kane, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I've also broken down the opening to Starship Troopers.)

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is absolutely one of my favorite books. The writing is lyrical and story heart-wrenching and beautiful. Greene's style of writing is such that he always has me gripped, whether it's the beginning of the book or the end. And he shows you so much about the character in his opening lines.

So, here are the first two paragraphs from the book:
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which, to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who - when he has been seriously noted at all - has been praised for his technical ability, but d…

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Art and Politics

Art is inherently political.

Let's just get that out of the way. We all have things we want to say (or things we want to not say) in our personal lives that shape the art we make. And artists, more often than not, are trying to say something with their art, even if their goal is to not say something.

There is no doubt that this has been a turbulent week in the country I live in. There are many of us that are confused and shocked and afraid of what might be to come in the future. That's understandable. As artists and writers, I feel like we're typically more empathetic than the general population. It's easy to think about what it's like to be in someone else's shoes because we spend so much of our creative time almost literally in someone else's shoes. And we need to pass that understanding on to our readers or viewers or however else they're consuming this art.

I've seen this troubling idea, though, that art needs to be purely for escape and that p…

50+ Rules and Tips About Writing I've Collected Over the Years

I have twenty or thirty notebooks and journals filled up with snippets about writing, my plans for stories, bits of dialogue, interesting ideas, plotlines, scraps of short stories, and a dozen other things. I carry one with me at all times and it takes me a couple of months to fill one up.

One of the things I've kept in one of my notebooks was a collection of writing tips and rules that I've collected over the years in my travels. From teachers, from books, from wherever. Most of my career has been spent screenwriting, so a lot of these are most applicable to that, but I wanted to present them so they might be of use to you as well.

I've never stopped collecting these over the years and I never will.

To start the list are Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of writing. They are the first in my notebook and, I think, the most useful. I'll add a star to those I think are applicable most to screenwriting. Some of these aren't applicable to everyone in every situation, but…

The stories of Bryan Young

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