Warren Adler's Blog, page 45

The Aspiring Writer

Warren Adler's advice to the aspiring writer.

Video Trailer: Target Churchill – A Thriller Torn from the Pages of History

Target Churchill – A Thriller Torn from the Pages of History from Warren Adler on Vimeo.

As Great Britain and the United States celebrate a victorious end to WWII, Joseph Stalin’s relentless Soviet Union is creeping across Eastern Europe leaving a trail of devastation and murder in its wake.

Winston Churchill, the cigar-puffing icon of the British fighting spirit embarks on a crusade to lift the veil of secrecy that hangs over Stalin’s mission. Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri sets the diplomatic stage upon which the world’s political players grapple for supremacy as Churchill delivers his fated Iron Curtain speech on March 5th 1946.

Soviet operatives have infiltrated British and American governments at the highest level. As Churchill prepares to launch the Cold War, Stalin unleashes his trained mole, an American Nazi who served in Hitler’s SS. His mission: Assassinate Winston Churchill.

Churchill travels with a lone bodyguard, W.H. Thompson, a former British police officer who protected Churchill faithfully through the turbulent years of war.…

The Future of English Literature and Humanities

Yes, the decline of the humanities challenges our present. Ultimately though, their pursuit is essential to our culture and sooner or later we will realize that there truth to that old chestnut that "man does not live on bread alone," and its necessity will come roaring back.

The Short Story: Back in the Game

Once a staple of the magazine and literary world, it had, for a variety of reasons, been neglected and had fallen out of favor.

Dive Into the Written Works Behind This Year’s Best Picture Nominees

If you enjoyed the motion pictures, you’ll love the books that inspired this year’s Oscar nominations.

Did you know that six of the nominated films were inspired by written works? Life of Pi and Les Misérables are well-known novels, but Silver Linings Playbook is also based on a book and three of the other nominees stem from a biography, a one-act play, and a magazine article. Lets take a look at the original words behind this year’s most critically acclaimed films!

Beast for the Southern Wild

The film starring Quvenzhané Wallis stems from Lucy Alibar’s one-act play Juicy and Delicious. Her play tells the story of a young child, Hushpuppy, who lives in the South with his dad and has to prepare himself for a life without grown-ups. Lucy cowrote the film version with the movie’s director, Benh Zeitlin, and the Beasts of the Southern Wild script expands on her original work.…

Mainstream media collapse gathers speed—and why that matters to you

… Not only is our world changing radically but it is changing radically very quickly.

Nowhere is this more true than in the world of mainstream print media, where legacy organizations are collapsing much more quickly than many of us would have expected, raising the question of—what’s a writer to do? How can a writer make a living? Especially, how can a student with real writing talent, who aspires to be a non-fiction writer, fulfil the dream? It’s possible, but it requires clear and creative thinking.

Read more: Denyse O’ Leary, TheBestSchools.org Blog

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We need a new era of digital journalism

Digital media needs to invent its own journalistic genres. The web and its mobile offspring, are calling for their own new journalism comparable to the one that blossomed in the 70s. While the blogosphere has yet to find its Tom Wolfe, the newspaper industry still has a critical role to play: It could be at the forefront of this essential evolution in journalism. Failure to do so will only accelerate its decline.

Read more: Frederic Filloux, The Guardian…

Coming of the Aged

Recent movie releases such as The New and Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet seem to be a crack in the mantra of marketing pundits that the only worthy targets of mass media are teenagers and those who reach the ceiling age of forty-nine, not beyond.

How to Fix Amazon’s Review System

It was inevitable that Amazon's laissez-faire book review system would come under fire for providing the opportunity to advocates of or against a particular book to game the system and either trash it or promote it... For Amazon, the system began with good intentions as a marketing device for books, but unintended consequences have made it both an unreliable and suspect platform. Worse, it has tempted the unscrupulous.

In Praise of the Creative Writing Course

In F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Beautiful and Damned, the writer Dick Caramel tells of a conversation with his uncle from Kansas: “All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his and then he says: ‘There’s a character for you! Why don’t you write him up? Everybody’d be interested in him.’ Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says: ‘Why don’t you write a story about that place? That’d be a wonderful setting for a story!’”

Anyone who has ever claimed to be a novelist will recognise this exchange. What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer? Or rather, what is it about writing that makes other people think they know how to do it?

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