Skip to main content

Star Wars Update!

Last weekend I had the tremendous honor of attending Star Wars: Celebration - Anaheim. It was four days of merriment based around the greatest space film saga of all time and I had the time of my life. I was on a number of panels and you can listen to most of them online:

  • Full of Sith - This is the podcast I host and we had a great show with a lot of cool guests.
  • The Mythology of Star Wars - This panel was a dissection of the mythology of Star Wars and the hero's journey. (I'll have audio of this one soon, it'll be of a lot of use to writers, I think.)
  • Star Wars Journalism -  This panel took a look at what it's like to cover Star Wars as a journalist and a freelancer.
  • A Tribute to Aaron Allston - This panel consisted of me, Del Rey Editor Shelly Shapiro, and Star Wars author Christie Golden and we told stories about our old friend and colleague. 
I was also in attendance when JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy unveiled the new Star Wars trailer and was asked by the folks at StarWars.Com to do an analysis of the trailer on the livestream that ran online during the convention.


Covering a convention like this as a writer and a journalist is always a fascinating experience. You're constantly talking to editors for possible leads on stories, you're looking for stories to tell, and you're wrapping your head around things in a way that will let you write about it all later. You're taking notes, looking for ways to approach things...

There's always something fascinating to see if you know how to look and you never know what you might witness, whether it's a moment between two people or a major news story. One of my favorite experiences was actually getting to go backstage at Disneyland and I catalogued every forbidden sight that I saw.

There are stories everywhere, fiction or non-fiction. You just need to be on the lookout.

As far as non-fiction, I wrote a lot about the event for Big Shiny Robot!, as well as a piece for The Huffington Post.

And don't forget to check out any of my books, drop reviews of them on Amazon or Goodreads, and follow me on twitter!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anatomy of a Scene: The Third Man

It's time again to break down a classic scene. One that's well-written and, in my view, a fine example of excellent craft.

I've done some of these articles from books (like The End of the Affairand Starship Troopers) and other movies (like Citizen Kane, City Lights, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but now it's time to take a look at a scene from The Third Man. It blends the best of Orson Welles (as he's in the film and drives this scene) and Graham Greene, who wrote this particular screenplay.

Before we get to the scene, we need some context.

The Third Man is a tale of the black market in Vienna, just after World War II. It's about a cheap, dime-store Western novelist named Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton) and his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles.) Lime offered Martins a job in Vienna, so Martins leaves America and arrives, only to find that Harry Lime is dead. Penniless, without a friend or reason to be in the country, h…
Post a Comment
Read more

Anatomy of a Scene - City Lights

We're going to break down another scene this week, and it's one of my favorites in cinema history. It comes from the ending of City Lights by Charlie Chaplin, which I think is the greatest romantic comedy ever made. 
It's a touching film from 1931 and I would make it mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to learn to tell a story.
The scene we're going to be breaking down comes from the very end of the film, so if you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you. Go watch the film. You can rent it for $3.99 in HD on Amazon or for free on Hulu with a free trial or plus subscription. You should just buy the Blu-ray, though. You're going to want to revisit it.
For those of you familiar with the movie, or for those of you who are going to ignore my pleas to watch it and go ahead with this post anyway, I'm going to set this clip up a bit before you watch it.
City Lights tells the story of Chaplin's Tramp and how he falls in love with a blind flower …
Post a Comment
Read more

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…
3 comments
Read more