Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 141

Jason Statham: Meg is a Cross Between Jaws & Jurassic Park

Meg star Jason Statham says the film is a cross between Jaws and Jurassic Park. A long-standing horror sub-genre is the killer animal film in which one of nature’s many predators seems to decide that they’ve had enough of humanity, and decides to take their frustrations out on any unfortunate person unlucky enough to cross their ferocious path. One of the most popular subjects of such a film is the killer shark, which makes perfect sense as sharks are one of the world’s most efficient killers, despite the instances of them actually attacking humans in real life being rare.

When it comes to killer shark flicks, the seemingly eternal gold standard is Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic Jaws, which is well known for making an entire generation of moviegoers afraid to take a dip in the ocean. In more recent years, there have also been a lot of science fiction-melded shark movies, such as 1999’s Deep Blue Sea – featuring sharks with enhanced intelligence – and the various Syfy originals that often feature a mad scientist messing with shark genetics seemingly for the fun of it.

The latest film to fit comfortably under both the sci-fi and killer shark banners is Meg, an adaptation of author Steve Alten’s popular 1997 novel of the same name, which itself has spawned four additional books in the Meg series, all written by Alten. Directed by Jon Turtletaub (National Treasure), Meg stars Jason Statham as expert diver and former Navy captain Jonas Taylor, who is called into action in order to save a trapped group of Chinese scientists from a gigantic prehistoric megalodon. When speaking about Meg during a recent appearance on the Jim & Sam radio show, Statham made a rather bold proclamation about what viewers can expect:

    “I just did a movie about a shark. It’s a cross between, I’d say, Jaws and Jurassic Park. It turned out really good. I mean, apparently. We don’t know until we see it. It’s called Meg, as in megalodon.”


While Meg’s various plot parallels to both Jaws and Jurassic Park are obvious, Statham opting to directly invoke both legendary Spielberg properties when talking about his latest project is a brave move, as it instantly elevates the level of expectations Meg will likely carry with audiences. On a side note, Statham’s gruff but heroic diver character also somewhat echoes a similar character portrayed by Thomas Jane in the aforementioned Deep Blue Sea, which did of course hit theaters two years after the release of Alten’s book.

With last year’s fairly sizeable hit The Shallows serving to raise the theatrical profile of killer sharks for the first time since the rise of campy efforts like Sharknado, fans of the sub-genre essentially created by Jaws are likely to pin their hopes on Meg to further reestablish the aquatic predators as a creature to be feared instead of laughed at. Only time will tell whether Meg succeeds, and takes a bite out of the summer 2018 box office.


Source: The Jim & Sam Show (via Bloody Disgusting)

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Kenneth Atchity On This Year's Author 101 University's Panel

Kenneth Atchity On Author 101's panel at the Hyatt Regency LAX with Marilyn Horowitz, Charlotte Gusay of Charlotte Gusay Literary Agency, Peter Levine, Monica Faulkner.
 

The State of "Selling Your Story to Hollywood" ... A Chat with Kenneth Atchity at Author 101 University!

The State of "Selling Your Story to Hollywood" ... A Chat with Kenneth Atchity!

Cady McClain on making SEEING IS BELIEVING: WOMEN DIRECT

Cady McClain directs. Credit Alex Di Suvero
Cady McClain has spent the past year traveling the globe, speaking to female directors of film and television and documenting their stories for her serialized documentary, Seeing is Believing: Women Direct. Interviewees include Sarah Gavron, Lee Grant, Meera Menon, Betty Thomas and other accomplished and award-winning directors, as well as the next generation of women filmmakers who are just out of filmschool and finding their career paths. Not yet ready for release, Seeing is Believing: Women Direct is intended to elucidate the skills and tools needed to succeed as a woman in the directing field, and features women mentoring women by sharing their experiences via filmed interviews. Here, McClain writes about her own filmmaking process, why she’s making this documentary series and what she’s learning from doing so. Read on…

Cady McClain on Making Seeing is Believing: Women Direct, Her Own and Other Women’s Visions, Gender Diversity in Film, and Sharing Skills:

“Today I was watching clips from an interview I did with the filmmaker Nicole Conn and I found myself smiling. One of the great pleasures of this documentary has been getting to know women like Nicole—women who are smart, talented and beautifully unique. Nicole is not categorized as a “mainstream” filmmaker yet, but she is an important one, and in a way she personifies why I am making this documentary series and what I value—she is true to herself. She is true to her vision. She loves old black and white movies, believes in romance, and is a gay woman. Her calling and talent is filmmaking, so she has made three seminal films about passionate relationships between lovers that happen to be female.

“Somehow her films, as wildly successful as they are (and they are WILDLY successful) are still not considered mainstream. So I have to ask myself, what is mainstream? What is it about one narrative (a narrative that is not inclusive of the reality of a very large percentage of the world’s population) that continues to have a hold over what we as a society deem “normal”?

“(Without finger pointing or getting political, I think it is fair to say that it is a mode of storytelling that is on the verge of becoming irrelevant.)

“Why should lesbian cinema be marginalized? Or faith-based films, Black or Latin cinema, Asian cinema, Indian cinema or women’s cinema for that matter? What IS normal in a world full of variation? Why must we categorize everything? How can we even use the expression “mainstream” when the Internet exposes us all to the cultures of the world?

“The process of making this series has exposed me to more kinds of storytelling and people than I thought possible. It has been so fulfilling to watch the art films of German filmmaker Diana Cignoni; the transgender series, HerStory, directed by Sydney Freeland; and the powerful short film And Nothing Happened by Naima Ramos-Chapman that explores the surreal after-life of a rape survivor. I think I’ve become a better person by watching Meera Menon’s first film, Farah Goes Bang, and the films of Lizzie Borden—Working Girls and the incredible Born in Flames. And the documentaries exploring American Indian life by Anne Makepeace are nothing short of breathtaking. These women are visionaries.

I’ve learned that categorizing films into “women’s stories” is actually a neat and tidy way to shame women. I also learned that being a visionary means holding your ground—not letting the words of others push you away from what you “see” in your mind as worthy.

I made this series because I want to give women and girls HOPE, ENCOURAGEMENT and TOOLS. Something they can watch quietly in the middle of the night to hear other women talk about how they work without being judged, talked down to, or lectured at. I want all women who desire to tell a story to feel heard and seen, validated and understood.

In Seeing is Believing: Women Direct, audiences will hear from women who are on the front lines of the field—from major award winners and those in the vanguard of television and feature films, to graduated students and frustrated auteurs. Considering all aspects of the directing experience for women, we will learn how they drive through obstacles creative, cultural and professional. The film is also intended to serve as “peer to peer mentorship” for anyone (of any gender) looking for guidance and real world experience as they pursue their dreams of becoming a visual storyteller. — Cady McClain





Read more at the The Female Gaze

Why I Teach Online by By Devoney Looser

I might never have sought an online teaching assignment if my husband hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer. Faced with a foreseeable future of his multiple hospital stays, home recovery, and anticipated need for my amateur nursing — all while trying to care for our two children — I jumped at the chance to temporarily transition to an online teaching schedule.

Having the option to work remotely and asynchronously was a godsend. I figured my online students would have no idea if I were moderating online discussions or grading papers while sitting next to a spouse hooked up to an Oxaliplatin IV. During this family crisis, I knew I would miss being in the same room with students, and the instantaneous give-and-take of a physical classroom. I only ever envisioned online teaching as a short-term reassignment.

I certainly never expected to love it, let alone come to believe in it as a matter of social justice and feminist practice. Yet much to my surprise, I do.

Faculty objections to online teaching remain widespread in the academic circles in which I travel. At each of the universities where I’ve taught, I’ve encountered colleagues who feared or despised it, most of the time without ever actually having taught online themselves. One department I was part of even passed a resolution against online teaching. (Unsurprisingly, that university simply found others willing to design the online curriculum that the regular faculty members refused to create.)

Years later, I still hear some of the same arguments against this instructional mode:

    "Isn’t online teaching just a space for slacker students who don’t want to work hard, or who don’t want to take my more challenging in-person courses?"    "Isn’t the university just going to steal my video lectures and replay them after I die, paying someone a pittance to grade the papers?"    "Isn’t online teaching a lightweight, cheaply made version of our regular offerings?"    "Isn’t online teaching all about making a buck off of a lousy product?"
My answer to all of those questions, I can now say confidently — and happily, as my husband is making a recovery from cancer — is "No." Online students are just as "present" in virtual discussions; they are just as ambitious and well-directed in their coursework; and they are every bit as hungry for knowledge as the in-person version.

Whatever you may fear to the contrary, your video lectures are not poised to become precious commodities to your employer a decade hence. Video does not age well, and savvy students are unlikely to stand for a curriculum centered on long-ago recorded images of a dead professor, passed off as up-to-date instruction.

Online teaching — like any kind of pedagogy — can be done well or poorly. It can be offered with or without appropriate workloads or challenges for students.

And as for making a buck? That depends on quality and cost to students. It’s true that online teaching is not currently subsidized by scholarships or financial aid as often as on-the-ground instruction. That varies by degree program and institution, of course. But by such logic, the very fact that online students may be paying full freight for the opportunity to earn a degree ought to put the onus on faculty members to offer good instructional value. We shouldn’t just throw up our hands.

The stereotype that online instruction is less rigorous, or that students cannot be engaged in it with appropriate rigor, isn’t borne out by my experience. Anyone who’s taught an on-the-ground class has looked out into the classroom and seen boredom or disconnection. By comparison, my online students were choosing when to log on to do their work. They seemed very tuned in when they did. It’s possible I’m just not as skilled at recognizing online students merely going through the motions, but I found them, as a group, exceptionally dedicated, motivated, and talented.

My perceptions were shaped by hearing how they ended up back in school. For most of them, an online program was their only path to a degree. They lived in rural areas, had no transportation, faced restricting disabilities, found themselves with demanding family obligations, or couldn’t find in-person courses offered at times that would allow them keep their jobs. An online education was rarely their first choice, but it was often their only option.

One of my most talented online students was a stay-at-home parent living thousands of miles away from the university. She’s raising nine children under the age of 14. In what previous era would she have been able to continue her education? At my institution (Arizona State University), we’re told that our "typical" online student is a female who, for a variety of reasons, left college the first time without taking a degree. She returns to us years afterward, often with significant financial and familial obligations. Why didn’t I realize sooner that online teaching is a feminist issue?

A chance, face-to-face encounter drove that point home to me. It was at a robust December commencement ceremony. That day I had the privilege to serve as the faculty marshal, carrying a big, heavy flag, leading hundreds of regalia-sporting faculty into the arena. I felt a little like a triumphant suffragette. How many institutions had even had female faculty marshals at their commencements in the year I was born, I wondered?

It was a meaningful ceremony to me for other reasons, too. My mother and aunt were in the crowd, visiting from a faraway state. Neither has a bachelor’s degree. As a teenager, I’d watched my mother labor to complete an associate degree at the local community college, but I was the first in my family to earn a B.A. Because my mother and other relatives couldn’t afford to travel to watch me graduate when I earned my Ph.D., they had never had a chance to see me wearing my doctoral robes. It was a big deal to me that these women who raised me were there proudly clapping in the audience on that December graduation day.

After the ceremony ended, I went outside of the arena to wait for my mom and aunt. I saw a young graduate, standing by herself, carrying one of the enormous balloons that had dropped from the ceiling during the ceremony. Everyone else around us was hugging someone or taking a photo, so we made eye contact and smiled.

"Congratulations!" I said to her, because I felt happy, and because it seemed to be the right thing to say to a new graduate standing by herself.

"Thanks!" she said, brightly.

The conversation might have ended there, but she then asked for my help. She was looking for one of her professors, she said, in order to thank her for changing her life. The problem was that she wasn’t exactly sure what this professor looked like. It had been an online course. She told me her professor’s name and discipline, but ours is a large university. I couldn’t help spot the faculty member.

I asked her more questions about her studies and future plans. She’d flown in from her snowy Midwestern state to walk at commencement. The online degree she’d just earned was her second bachelor’s. Her first had been in an on-campus experience, but this online degree, she said, meant much more. That’s because this time around, she’d studied what she was passionate about, instead of what others had wanted her to. I teach courses on Jane Austen, so her story struck me as like the heroine Anne Elliot’s in Persuasion. This student "at seven-and-twenty, thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen." She stood there, before me, in her second, stunning academic bloom.

Earning her degree hadn’t been easier the second time, she said. Her online degree was actually far more challenging than her on-the-ground college experience had been. She loved that and was weighing pursuing a graduate degree. I emerged from our conversation convinced that she would go on to do great things — and I told her so. I realized that, in that moment, I must do my best to stand in for her wished-for online professor.


It was only later that I realized how she, too, had served as a stand-in for me. I wished I could have looked all of my online students in the eye and congratulated them in person, shaking their hands and thanking them for their insights, energy, and enthusiasm. I would have told them about the great things I believed they were going to go on to do. I felt the loss of that in-person exchange.

I do not, by any means, advocate for online education as a utopian pedagogical space. Indeed, events like graduation ceremonies convince me that online teaching can never supplant in-person instruction.

Even so, there was a pleasure in talking to someone else’s online student. It made me imagine the enterprise we’re engaged in as large and containing multitudes. Many of my online students — the majority of them hard-working women with very complicated lives — started out in situations like my mother’s and my aunt’s. The degrees that many of our online students are earning today would have gone unearned a generation ago.

Faculty know better than any other professional group that every reliable indicator demonstrates how a more-educated populace is to the benefit of us all. For that reason alone, online students do not deserve even a smidgen of snobbery, skepticism, or scorn. Online students deserve — like all of our students — unfailing encouragement, deep admiration, and the best instruction we have to offer. Although all signs point to my not needing to request online teaching next year, if I have the chance, I’ll choose to do it again.

Reposted from The Chronicle of Higher Education


Devoney Looser is professor of English at Arizona State University. Her latest book, The Making of Jane Austen, will be published this summer by the Johns Hopkins University Press. She’s on Twitter @devoneylooser and @Making_Jane.

Un-Civil War between Our Two Americas by Kenneth Atchity

Walls we don’t see are often stronger than walls we see. Election after election, the blue-red map clearly shows these United States of America are united by fable only, and in nearly every other way really are two Americas.

Rejiggering the Electoral College won’t alleviate the situation because (a) the Electors actually serve an important purpose, as long as the country is configured the way it currently is; and (b) neither Party can achieve the reconfiguration: the Party in power will not allow it, and the opposing Party won’t have the votes to make it happen. Anyway it won’t solve the deep schizophrenia manifest in the concept of a single America, one perhaps so endemic that the founding fathers were also struggling with it.

Conservative America

Today the walls are pretty well-defined. “Conservative America” is by far the bulk of the American land mass. It extends from Florida north to North Carolina and west to the border of California (with the quirky up jutting of New Mexico and Colorado). It includes the entire South and Midwest, and Alaska.

Conservative America is the land of apple pie, of lawn and porch flags, picnics in the park, Christian churches disseminating not only platitudes but also attitudes that hold society together focused firmly on the past and therefore worshiping old-fashioned conservative values, homogeneity —and fierce nostalgia for the way things were and are supposed to remain. Hospitality yes, tolerance not so much. Feminism is viewed with alarm, and the “right to life” outweighs a woman’s right to choose and control her body and her future. Though diversity has made fiscal inroads in nearly every state of Conservative America, it has not found a permanent place in the minds and hearts of the folks, mostly white, in control. Conservative America is the birthplace and habitat of the Tea Party and of the right to bear arms at all times.

I was born in one Conservative American state, Louisiana, and raised through high school in another, Missouri. The population of the thirty states that comprise Conservative America is around 100,000,000, or 1/3 of the whole. Conservative America, because it occupies more States, has more Electors.

Progressive America

Since I drove away to college at Georgetown in D.C. at the age of seventeen I’ve lived in Progressive America ever since: Connecticut, California, and New York. Progressive America occupies the entire Pacific coast from California, with Hawaii by extension—to Washington, and the blue islands of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico surrounded by the red sea; on the northern border, Illinois and Minnesota; and, on the Atlantic, north from Virginia to Maine and west through Pennsylvania. You might argue that Progressive American is synonymous with urban America, and Conservative America with rural America. But it’s not quite that simple.

If Conservative America is the land of hard-headed practicality, Progressive America welcomes dreamers, many of them immigrants from Conservative America, and many of whose dreams seem to come true—and shape the world’s future. It’s La La Land vs. Hell or High Water.

Progressive America salutes the American flag and truly loves the idea of America; but it can also applaud turning that flag into panties, bras, and protest banners. The Progressive idea of America embraces the future, which it honors with hope and belief in the genius of the individual; diversity. It’s the land of civil rights most widely defined; of gun control; of visionary education, its leading universities including UCLA, Berkeley, and Stanford, Northwestern not to mention Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton; and of people who worry about global warming and try to do something about it.

Progressive America isn’t afraid of the word socialism because it’s understood to mean people showing their gratitude for abundance and their respect for others by making sure all citizens have an acceptable and meaningful life. While Conservative America fears immigration as a threat to its conservatism, Progressive America embraces immigrants as the defining reality of its concept of America, “land of immigrants.” The statue of liberty guards its coast and its citizens still adhere to Emma Lazarus’ verse:

…From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Roughly two-thirds of the United States’ population, around 200 million people, live within Progressive America—2/3 of the whole.

The Dangers of Division

In each America live citizens whose hearts yearn, secretly or not, for the other America. Their exile is allowed, if they can bear it. If they can’t, they’re still free to cross from one America to the other.

Loquacious citizens of both Americas have hearts and minds that feel and think their views are superior to those of the other America. But most would agree there’s room on the continent for both Americas. Each is free to visit the other, as though we were the American Common Market.

Should we formalize the reality we all recognize and restructure things a bit so that Californians and New Yorkers, the leading states of Progressive America, can elect their own President to push their liberal, even socialist, agendas? Elections held in Conservative America would allow their President to maintain the conservative standard. Between the two Americas, trade would be arranged to advance the fraternal needs of both citizenries. Respect and civility would grow from the integrity of each America, to replace the hatred now streaming between them because of the deeply-held and media-reinforced belief on both parts that the “other America” is either evil or insane—or both. We could talk to each other instead of imitating the shouting mode of

I, for one, love both Americas, and would hate to lose either, or see violence between them extend from words to bullets.

Just a little longer ...

Warner Bros. has moved back “Meg” to Aug. 10, 2018. It was previously dated for March 2, 2018.


Warner Bros. has moved back Jason Statham’s prehistoric giant shark thriller “Meg” to Aug. 10, 2018.

It was previously dated for March 2, 2018, and would have opened against an untitled Fox/Marvel film. The movie will be released in 3D and Imax. “National Treasure” helmer Jon Turteltaub is directing the film with Chinese actress Li Bingbing co-starring with Jessica McNamee, Ruby Rose, and Rainn Wilson. Shooting began in New Zealand last fall.

Read more

Time Management for Writers: The Stopwatch Method for Massive Creative Productivity

Managing your work is a fool’s game because work is infinite. Good work only creates more work; in fact, bad work creates more work too.

So the more you work the more work you will have to do. It’s basic common sense that you can’t manage an infinite commodity.

What can you manage? Time.

You not only can, but must, manage your time because time is all too finite.
They say, “If you want to get something done, find a busy person.” The busy person succeeds in getting things done because he knows how to manage his or her time.

We all have the exact same amount at our disposal: 60 minutes each hour, 24 hours each day, 168 hours each week, 8,736 hours each year. If you put one hour into a project each day for a year, you’d have worked on it for 365 hours—more than enough time to write a book, and a screenplay, and a treatment or two.
“If you place a little upon a little,” explained the ancient Greek almanac writer Hesiod in his Works and Days, “soon it becomes a lot.”


Time Management Should Be EasyWhere do you find the time to get your most important work done every day?

One memorable day in Manhattan I was delivering a broken antique wall clock to my favorite repair shop. As I completed my drop off and turned to leave, I noticed an ultra-modern stand-up clock constructed of shiny pendulums, a different metal each for hours, minutes, and seconds, all enclosed in a sleek glass case. It was simply the most beautiful timepiece I’d ever seen.

Then I realized: it had no hands. At first I thought, No wonder it’s in the shop. It’s broken. But I studied the clock more closely.



No. It was designed without hands. It was a timepiece that Salvador Dali would have been as thrilled with as I was. Time moves in its own way unless we somehow capture it.

It reminded me that time is a free force. It just happens, whether you do anything about it or not. It’s up for grabs. It doesn’t belong to your family, or to your friends, or to your day job, or to anyone but you! What you’re working on at any given moment is how you control it.

The trick is where do you find that free time?—a question busy people are asked regularly. Here’s their secret: busy people make time, for the activities they decide to prioritize. One good way to wrestle with the problem they’ve solved is to ask yourself, “Where do I lose it?” When you find the answers to that question they may shock you.

I ask writers to make a chart of their weekly hours and use it to determine how many hours they devote to each activity in their cluttered, over-stimulated lives.
Maybe you’d be surprised—or maybe not—that most people have no idea where the time goes.

They come back to me with a grand total of 182, or 199, or 82 hours of activity—until I remind them that they, like every other human, have the same 168 hours each week to spend.

Then we get serious and analyze exactly where they’re lying to themselves about the time: forgetting about the endless phone calls with friends, or the true amount of time in front of the television, or the accurate time devoted to the daily commute, or the time doing absolutely nothing but staring out the window. When we get the time inventory accurate most people are surprised at the truth. But truth is the first step to freedom, and managing your time effectively is the greatest freedom of all.

I call it “making the clock of life your clock.” I believe in this philosophy so much I haven’t worn a regular watch for nearly thirty years, despite owning a vintage wrist watch that belonged to my father and an even older pocket watch that belonged to my grandfather. The only chronograph I carry around with me is one that allows me to make life’s clock my clock:a stopwatch.

The stopwatch makes the Spanish proverb, la vida es corta pero ancha (“life is short but wide”) come true.

You can get a free stopwatch app on your cell phone! In fact, most smartphones come with a built-in stopwatch app like the Clock app on iPhones.
The Stop Watch Method of Time ManagementThe stopwatch method of time management is simple. You use it to capture time, to make sure that your Priority Writing Project is getting the amount of attention you want to give it to move it—and your career success–ahead with certainty.
You know that the wall clock, or the one on your wrist or displayed on your cell phone, has a way of running away with your day. You say you’ll work on your Priority Writing Project from seven to eight a.m. and something is certain to come along to disrupt that hour almost as though life were conspiring against you.

What’s really happening is that you’re letting life interfere with your personal time management.

Of course when the interference occurs, you tell yourself I’ll catch up later,or say, “I’ll start again tomorrow and this time protect myself from interruptions.” But over the years we discover that life usually runs rampant over any and all such resolutions.

The stopwatch method works best in a life jam-packed with stimuli and distraction. It allows you to steal time. While clocks on wrists and walls record public time, your private prime time happens only when your stopwatch is running. The stopwatch allows you to call “time out” from the game everyone else is engaged in.

Simply promise yourself you won’t go to sleep at night until, by hook or by crook, you’ve clocked on your stopwatch one hour (sixty minutes) of working on Priority Writing Project.

Turn the stopwatch ON when you’re working on it, and OFF when you get interrupted.

Your stopwatch minutes may be harvested over a six-hour period, or over a twenty-four-hour period. You steal them when you can: waiting at the dentist’s, commuting to the ferry, when your lunch appointment hasn’t shown up yet, when your cell phone dies and no one can reach you until you’ve replaced or recharged the battery, when your date for the evening calls in sick.

It takes a few days to get used to this process, but once you do you’ll recognize the power it gives you over time.

If I could give you a magic pill that guaranteed you would work on your most important goals and dreams in life for one hour each day, would you take it?
Of course! And that’s exactly what the stopwatch method of time management does—it guarantees that your most important work gets done each day if you stick to the plan.
Optimum Attention Span (OAS)How do you know how much time to devote to your Priority Writing Project—or to any activity, for that matter?

That’s a function of what I call Optimum Attention Span (OAS). For some activities, like watching your favorite sports event or shopping, your OAS might be extremely wide; for others, like listening to your boss complain or to your domestic partner nag, it might be miniscule. The trick is to determine what the OAS is for that Priority Writing Project.

At the start of any project, OAS tends to be smaller; as the project gains momentum and begins to appear reachable, your OAS expands. So when you start planning to write that novel, nonfiction books, or screenplay, give yourself 30-45 minutes on the stopwatch during the first week.

But reassess OAS at the end of each week because OAS changes and evolves. By the fourth week you may well be up to an hour and a half—ninety minutes on the stopwatch.
Increasing Productivity with “Linkage”Isn’t it hard to work in fits and starts?

You might very well ask that very good question. The answer is that it’s actually easier to work that way than it is to work without stopping if you employ my time-management technique of linkage, what Hemingway referred to as “leaving a little water in the well.”

Here’s how linkage works. The phone rings, so you have to turn off your stopwatch. But you let it ring one or two more times, taking that time to make a mental decision about what you’ll do when your stopwatch is running again—that is, in your next Priority Writing Project stopwatch session.

And here’s an interesting secret: it doesn’t matter what decision you make when you turn the stopwatch back on.

The minute you make that decision, as you answer the phone and go on from one activity to the next, your mind starts thinking of better decisions than the one you just made; in fact, your mind becomes increasingly motivated to get back to that Priority Writing Project because it knows exactly what it will do when the next session begins.

You’ve created an automatic linkage—that makes restarting when your stopwatch is next running no longer an occasion for blockage.
Instead, you’re fully ready to jump in and get as much out of that next session as possible before it’s interrupted by life’s next distraction.

And, yes, have a desk drawer filled with stopwatches so you can employ a different colored one for each major project you’re engaged with. Or you can use different stopwatch apps on your phone.

The stopwatch method will truly make the clock of life your clock.It’s the magic writing pill.
Dr. Kenneth Atchity (Georgetown B.A., Yale Ph.D.) has been teaching time management throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe for decades.

Books include A Writer’s Time: Making the Time to Write (ebook: Write Time: Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision—and Beyond); How to Quit Your Day Job and Live out Your Dreams ; Writing Treatments that Sell (with Chi-Li Wong), Sell Your Story to Hollywood: Writer’s Pocket Guide to the Business of Show Business and, with Ridgely Goldsborough, Why? Marketing for Writers . Dr. Atchity’s more than thirty films include Meg, the Emmy-nominated Kennedy Detail, Hysteria, Erased, Joe Somebody, and Life or Something like It.

Companies serving writers include www.thewriterslifeline.com, www.storymerchant.com, and www.storymerchantbooks.com. and teaching sessions can be accessed at www.RealFastHollywoodDeal.com.


 






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