ScriptSuperhero.com

The great thing about writing for a living is that you don’t necessarily have to be in an office to get your work done. If you own a laptop, you can go just about anywhere.

So quick, while summer is here to enjoy, take advantage of the great weather. Go somewhere gorgeous, somewhere with wild animals, fresh air, a lakeside view, teak outdoor furniture and plenty of time to split between writing and fishing. (Or hiking, if that’s your gig.)

Despite what the global warming fanatics may say, summer is here and gone all too quickly. There’s no reason a wordsmith cannot also be a bass master. I went on a Sunday-Thursday fishing retreat and while I didn’t take a laptop with me, ever since I returned, I’ve been refreshed, revived, and full of new energy toward writing.

It may work for you as well.

Humor can lend warmth to a story, a sense of family, and a lot of entertainment value. The trouble is, the reader (or viewer) really has to know the characters well enough to appreciate humor, or it falls flat and runs the risk of alienating the audience from those characters.

Take Star Trek: The Next Generation as a perfect example. As the second episode after the big debut that introduced Q, the producers chose to put the cast through a humorous adventure that included Wesley Crusher taking over engineering and Tasha Yar bedding Lt. Cmdr. Data. And lord only knows was Lt. Worf was doing up in the ladder rack, out of sight of the camera.

While the episode came off better in reruns as time went on, it certainly didn’t play well as a second episode. It may even be one of the prime reasons fans grew to despise the character of Wesley Crusher so violently.

Don’t make the same mistake in your own writing. Even in books that are intended to be humorous, one must come to know the characters and care about them a bit for most good humor to work.

It doesn’t require Dr. Larry Shapiro to figure out why sometimes the hardest thing can be to figure out an ending to a good story: it is hard, and even the best fall victim.

Remember the Lord of the Rings trilogy movie and the “17 endings” that so many people complained about? Hey, even the book was kind of like that. Tolkein was a great writer, but he went into overkill on ending his best works. It happens because once a writer senses the end of a story coming up, there’s a strong urge to do the: “here’s how everyone turned out in the end” thing.

Another writer who is guilty of such “ending overkill” is John Irving. I mean, I loved the World According to Garp characters as much as anyone, but do we really need to know how Garp’s newborn son turns out? That’s where the movie was superior; the story’s over after Pooh shoots Garp dead on the gymnasium floor.

There are other ways to ruin endings to good stories; I may talk about some others in a different post sometime.

One of the best cures for writer’s block, other than leaving writing and going into selling truck accessories, is to kill someone off.

No, I don’t mean become a murderer in real life. I mean in your story, genius. This simple advice goes back at least to Lawrence Block. And he’s right.

Think about it. Your story is established and things are going along pretty well, but the story just has no juice, no jazz, no energy.

Kill someone off. It could be a supporting cast member, a villain, a family member… heck, even the main character works in a pinch.

Death opens up plenty of story possibilities. You have to show the grief process, plumb the prayers of the survivors, have a character figure out how and why the death occurred and who that death does to motivate the rest of the cast.

This one’s money in the bank: when you’re blocked, kill someone. Your story will be the better for it.

The biggest barrier to completing projects in writing is focus. In today’s high-tech world, there are plenty of more-entertaining and more-pleasant ways to spend time.

Whether its burning and listening to your music on an iPod, Web surfing, TV, videogames, fishing, hitting the greens with your Ping Golf equipment or even just spending time with your significant other, there’s always something you’d rather be doing than writing.

We’re all guilty of it, so let’s just be honest: writing is hard work and the best way never to finish anything is to let yourself get distracted. Of course, you’ll never get published that way. Trust me.

You know, everyone thinks they have at least one book in them. The only reason we don’t see most of them is that they never get written. It’s easy to say you’re a writer, or that you want to be, but if you don’t write every single day, if you’re not producing, it’s all a lot of hot air and ego. A pitcher never gets to the World Series if he doesn’t log in the practice hours and a writer never gets published or produced without a lot of hours putting words on paper.

It’s not that hard a concept to understand, and real writers get this. The main difference between all those aspiring James Pattersons and the real James Patterson isn’t so much the level of fame attained; after all, Patterson was unpublished once, too.

No, the difference is that he kept writing, kept finishing projects and kept at it until finally something he wrote broke through. Assuming you know how to form words into cogent stories, that’s the only difference. Practice.

Writing content under deadline is one of the biggest challenges a writer can face. It’s also one of the most important for working writers.

John Irving, for example, can write beautiful prose, wonderful novels that sing of a mastery of the English language. But he completes perhaps one novel every three to seven years; he’d never last in the world of television, where the average staff writer has to complete perhaps four or five one-hour episodes as part of a 22-episode series, on a show’s writing staff, each season. Most of these scripts have to be completed in a matter of a week for a first draft, and in a matter of hours for successive rewrites.

Irving would never survive.

And becoming John Irving isn’t easy; it takes a lot of hard work and a minor miracle or two to find publishers willing to publish your work these days, let alone wait such long stretches between masterpieces.

Far more common is the work of James Patterson; his novels may not be the literary masterpieces Irving produces, but he can pump them out at a rate of three to five a year. Guess who would have a better chance of working and succeeding in Hollywood?

Guess that’s why this fall’s TV schedule does feature a Woman’s Murder Club series, but no show based on “The World According to Garp.”