You Mean Everyone’s Going to See This?

By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer Talking with friends over the weekend…about our creative efforts and our dreams of more time/energy/money/inspiration to pursue new avenues for expression. Scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find that everyone has something else they’d rather be doing. I don’t mean sitting poolside with a fresh margarita […]

Alone, but not lonely…

Cultivating a knack for solitude. By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer “I want to be left alone,” Greta Garbo famously said, and from that one innocuous sentence sprang up a pop culture mythology she could never overcome. Ever after she was the solitary muse, the mysterious introvert, the one person who needed […]

Lace up and head on out into your story.

By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it. Pixar story artist Emma Coats A few days ago, I talked about high concept and the art of the tagline. The idea was to […]

Do What You Want, Do What You Can, Just Do…

Feed Your Artist’s Soul By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer “We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I’m not so sure we deserve such be A-pluses for that.” Toni Morrison Last night, just as I was dozing off to […]

High Concepts and Zombie Projects

By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer Back in the day, when I was an aspiring screenwriter with stars in my eyes and a an almost completed Bachelor’s degree from college on the coast, I took a 2 unit “pass/no pass” class called, succinctly enough, “The Film Industry.” One day a week, for […]

Sidelined

Thoughts from the Sickbed By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer This week the unexpected happened: I got sick. We all know that from time to time, we’ll succumb to a fever, a runny nose or whatever bug is making the rounds, but when it happens it’s always a bit of a surprise. […]

Stealing Time and Mining Material

Memory Triggers By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer The scent of fallen pine needles cooking under a summer sun. Stretching my hands up over my head on a lazy Sunday morning. The guitar riff in Chris Isaak’s “Graduation Day.” These are some of my memory triggers – benign and, perhaps, banal little […]

Surrender and Start Again

Reentering the Imaginative World By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer I had to say “no” the other day. It’s not a word I like to use. It speaks of disappointment and hurt feelings. When I just can’t (or, less often, simply “won’t”) do it, I know I’m letting people down – and […]

Life Is Not A Paragraph

Rule Breakers and the Grammarians Who Love Them By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer “That’s why I got a Ph.D. in English, precisely so I could avoid the proper use of a comma.” My old boss. Oh, the righteous indignation of the grammarian! Whole books have been written about bad grammar, fueled […]

Successful Screenplays and the Art of Mediocrity

What do you do when “okay” is good enough? By Elizabeth Cutright © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer As a once aspiring screenwriter, I full enjoyed Stephen Harrigan’s fun piece in today’s Slate detailing the highs and lows of a mediocre career as a Movie-of-the-Week screenwriter. In his confessional essay “I Was an A-List Writer […]

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“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed…”

Month: July 2012