I like music for writing inspiration b/c it’s so personal. Recently, I was writing a character for a class and the instructor, rightly, pointed out that I didn’t have a handle on who the character was, and so it wasn’t coming across. I struggled and struggled until, in an unrelated way, I picked up the most recent Scary Kids, Scaring Kids album, where I found that several of the songs matched the mental state I was trying to create in the character.

I can’t imagine, however, that those songs would ever get onto the soundtrack. They would be so obvious and uncomfortable, telling the story for me instead of creating a mood.

sorry that took so long.

Read Raymond Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” It doesn’t give any hints about how to create a good plot structure, but gives a lot of examples of what Chandler considered to be contrived mystery storylines.

• Lex

They have some experience on the matter, having written Ed Wood, Man on the Moon and The People Vs. Larry Flynt as well as producing Auto Focus. (Although I would argue that a different approach can work as well; Walk the Line comes to mind.)

And to be frank, phonetic writing can also be pretty insulting to the culture you’re trying to emulate. Imagine writing a period African-American character and giving him/her the line, “I sho’ do likes you, Miss Clarice!” If you describe the character adequately, the clearer, “I sure do like you, Miss Clarice,” will give the reader and performer the proper flavor of what you’re going for. But there’s nothing worse than a writer who is nothing like you saying, “This is how you people talk.”

In short, dialects are regional or cultural rhythms made up of slurs, word substitutions and words being dropped altogether: “Y’all, I walked down them stairs, nearly broke my neck.” You can give a very strong sense of a dialect without having to insert random vowels or even drop a lot of g’s. Trust the actor to do that for you. If they can do the dialect, they know where to adjust.

Since you might still be in that `sprint’-mode, maybe you could just answer a quick question. How many pages do you generally write in a dedicated hour of writing? I know this might be a difficult question, as in some hours you might write a couple of lines and in another hour you might be on a roll, but I’m just looking for a ballpark figure.

Thanks