SEARLS' PEARLS: Jewels and Rules

The only obligation to which the novelist can be held is to interest the reader.

Henry James

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TO GET YOUR COMPETITIVE JUICES GOING:
Screenwriting: WGA registered 40,000 screenplay and treatment titles last year. There were 250,000 screen stories written, perhaps not all in screen form.
There were 400-500 films made. There are 20 options bought for every film that is made.
Books: There are approximately 130 new titles printed every day. (Almost 50,000/year).

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The adjective is the enemy of the noun.

Voltaire

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The adverb is the enemy of the verb.

Hank Searls

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SCREENWRITERS

Don't end any act exactly on the half-hour, or you'll tempt the viewer to change channels.

Each act must have a little climax at its end to motivate viewers to stay through commercial.

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LINE EDITORS

The strongest drive is not sex or greed. It is one person's need
to change alter amend modify improve revise
qualify transform change stet another's copy.

W. H. Audon

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YOU ARE NEVER TOO OLD TO BEGIN

Dame Catherine Cookson, a laundress in a London slum, began writing historical novels at 40. When she died this year at 91, she'd published 100 novels which sold 100 million copies in 18 languages.

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ARTIFICIAL AUTHORS
"Computers will routinely write novels. That stuff is very easy to teach an AI system. You'll get a nice crisp three-act structure with the conflict resolved. Everything you can articulate in the classroom will be housed in that system. Then locally it will be filled in. You want a Hemingway style, you get a Hemingway style. You pick your author."
Bart Kosko, PHD
Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, USC
Quoted in "Fuzzy Logic", by
Daniel McNeil and Paul Freiberger
  "French invested eight years and $50,000, inputting two Jacquline Susann novels along the way... to program a computer to create a dynamite novel."
Jacket blurb for the novel "Just This Once", by Scott French and his computer Hal.

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MILTON ON PLAGIARISM

"For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiarč."

John Milton, "Iconoclastes"