If you’re a writer or artist or entrepreneur and you sometimes think to yourself, “I have nothing unique to say,” you’re wrong and I’ll tell you why. First, that voice in your head is 100-proof Resistance. It’s bullshit. I get a lot of e-mails from the trenches and, trust me, Resistance is spamming you with the same boilerplate it uses on everyone, including me. So that’s Reason #1 not to listen to that voice. Reason #2 is a lot deeper and more subtle. When we think to ourselves, “I have nothing unique to say,” we are thinking with our surface…

I’ve been traveling overseas for the past few weeks, and one of things I’ve encountered is a vehicle navigation system called WAZE. WAZE has a couple of cool features that I’d never seen before. (Forgive me if this kind of system is old-hat to you; it was blockbuster, earth-shaking news to me.) First, WAZE takes traffic into account in real time. Accidents, speed traps, construction delays; WAZE is on the case, suggesting alternative routes and automatically recalculating your ETA. It presents you with three choices of route, including the estimated time-to-destination of each. “Ah, it’s 21.6 minutes by Route A…

Once we turn pro (and even before we do), our Muse has plans for us. Those plans are our career-in-potential. They exist, whether we choose to believe in them or not. And they’re operating upon us, influencing us like the gravitational pull of an enormous invisible star. If you’re a writer, your career-in-potential is a shelf of books. Your books. Books you’ve written. They exist now, even if you haven’t started Book #1. Just as your family exists, even if you haven’t yet met the mother of your children. It helps, I believe, to think in these terms. Seventeen years…

To say that a voice (or a look or a sound) is “real” in art requires quotation marks. We will never speak in our “real” voice because the very act of speaking in a compelling and interesting manner requires, first, a point of view—and every point of view implies a voice that is dictated, and thus made “true,” by the context in which that point of view is taken. Was Churchill’s voice “real?” Was Homer’s? Our “real” voice, when we’re lucky enough to find it, becomes the voice of that point of view. The more closely the voice coincides with…

In screenplay lingo, writers and directors refer to the “A” story and the “B” story. (There can be a “C,” “D,” and “E” story, but let’s leave those alone for the moment.) The “A” story is the dramatic core of the movie. It’s the foreground—the primary throughline that the protagonist follows. The “B” story is a supporting saga, running on a parallel (and often seemingly-unrelated) track. In The Hangover, the “A” story is the guys’ efforts to find their friend Doug. The “B” story is Stu’s (Ed Helms) struggle to break out of thrall to his shrew girlfriend back in…