God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

It's hard to believe that we've been able to manage five years on this Earth without the wit, wisdom, and moral compass of Kurt Vonnegut.

The man influenced me more than most have. Reading his work is like visiting an old friend, his writing is warm and inviting, sharp, funny, and any of a hundred other positive adjectives.

When I learned of his death, five years ago today, I felt as though I lost a friend. The idea that I'd never read another biting essay by the man, or another new book, was not an easy one to come to terms to.

Over the years I've written a number of stories and essays that I felt were directly inspired by Vonnegut and I published them in a book called "God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut." In it, I gave background material about my personal and one-sided artistic relationship with Vonnegut and how he influenced me over the years.

To commemorate Vonnegut on the fifth anniversary of his passing, I want to give some copies of the book away in a way that honors the man in some small, probably insignificant way.

In order to win one of the three copies I'm giving away (though that number might go up depending on how much response this gets) all you need to do is hit up your twitter account and tweet about what Vonnegut's influence was on you and tag it with #GodBlessYouMrVonnegut.

If you don't have a twitter, hit me up here on facebook and tell me how Vonnegut inspired or shaped you.

If you're not on facebook OR twitter, leave a comment below.

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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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