One of our earlier posts in this series on the Professional Mindset was called “You, Inc.” It observed that many Hollywood screenwriters (including me) find it useful to incorporate themselves. These writers don’t perform their labors as themselves but as “loan-outs” from their one-man or one-woman corporations. Their contracts are “f/s/o”—for services of—themselves. I’m a big fan of this way of operating. Not so much for the financial or legal benefits, which really aren’t particularly significant, but for the mindset this style of working promotes. If you and I are a corporation, we’ve gotta get our act together. Amateur…

  When we finish any work of art or commerce and expose it to judgment in the real world, three things can happen: Everybody loves it. Everybody hates it. Nobody notices that it even exists. [Continuing our exploration of the Professional Mindset, let me repurpose this post that first ran about four years ago.] All three present you and me as writers and artists with major emotional challenges, and all three drive deep into the most profound questions of life and work. It will not surprise you, I suspect, if I say that all three responses are impostors. None of…

  My first agent was a gentleman named Barthold Fles. He was seventy years old. When I fictionalized him in The Knowledge, I made him ninety-six. But he was really seventy. I was twenty-nine at the time, so Bart had me by forty-one years. He was Swiss. He had represented Bertolt Brecht and even Carl Jung. He had seen and done everything. One day Bart said to me, “How much is 427 minus one?” I gave the obvious answer: 426.   “No,” said Bart. “It’s zero.”   He was speaking about pages in a novel. If the full book is…

  We lost a valued member of our online community this past week—David Y.B. Kaufmann of New Orleans and Houston passed away after a two-year battle with cancer. If you’ve read the Comments section of this blog, you know David. His contributions were always keen and insightful, and pretty funny too. He was also a damn good writer. His series, The Scotch & Herring Mysteries, was original, smart, and one-of-a-kind. He leaves seven children, his wife Nechama, and a round of grandchildren on the way. We send our deepest condolences to all the Kaufmann family. We’re all one good guy…

  [Continuing our series on the Professional Mindset … ]   I’m reading a great book now (thanks, Bill Wickham, for turning me onto it) called Bugles and a Tiger, My Life in the Gurkhas by John Masters. This is the kind of book I absolutely devour—a straight-ahead memoir, no plot, no characters, just an absolutely true account of a fascinating life experience, in this case the tale of a young Brit who served in India in the 30s in a legendary Gurkha battalion. What exactly is a Gurkha? The Gurkhas are Nepalese peasantry. Modest of stature, often illiterate, incredibly…