The easiest villain to write is the external villain. The Alien. The shark in Jaws. The Terminator. Doc Ock, Bane, Immortan Joe. Or force-of-nature villains—the volcano in Volcano, the oncoming Ice Age in The Day After Tomorrow, the Mayan-prophecy-end-of-the-world in 2012. External villains present existential threats to our physical existence. These sonsofbitches will kill you, eat you, freeze you, boil you. The problem with external villains, though they may occasionally deliver bestseller sales and boffo box office, is they don’t often bring out the best in the stars who must confront them. Why? Because the stars only have to duel…

  I turn down all clueless asks. What exactly is a clueless ask? Anyone who sends me their manuscript unsolicited. Anyone who asks me to meet them for lunch. Anyone who sends me an e-mail headed “Hi” or “Hello there” (or with no salutation at all.) Anyone who asks me how to get an agent. Anyone who asks me to introduce them to my agent. These are not malicious asks. The writers who send them are nice people, motivated by good intentions. They’re just clueless. They have committed one of two misdemeanors (or both). First, they have demonstrated that they…

    What are the virtues of an entrepreneur? What qualities of mind do you and I need if we are going to succeed as artist/entrepreneurs? One answer (the one I usually use) is to say we need the virtues of warriors: Courage. Self-reliance. The ability to endure adversity. Another way is to say we need the virtues of mothers. I had a dream once. I was living in New York, driving a cab at night, trying to write in the daytime. A friend came to visit. My friend was one of these wildly extroverted guys, who immediately went out…

  Candidates for office in all lands and in every century make the same promise to the voters they hope to attract:   I will get you what you want and it will cost you nothing.   “Want your job back? A free college education? No problem. I’ll get it for you.” Something for nothing is the offer a drug dealer makes to an addict or a mother provides for an infant. In the grownup world, something for nothing does not exist. Yet politicians sell it to us, and we fall for it every time. Why? The amateur, the infant,…

  Suppose you, an aspiring writer (or even an established one), got the chance to have a two-hour lunch with Stephen King? How much would that be worth? If you had to put a dollar figure on it, how much would you pay to have that experience? What price would make it fair to Stephen King for the expenditure of his time, for permitting you access to his wisdom? What would it be worth to you, just to hang out with the master of horror over a cheeseburger and fries? Or … Suppose you were a young architect and you…