John August

Archives for 2012

Workspace: John Gatins

Workspace

john gatins headshotWho are you and what do you write?

I am a screenwriter who has written a few sports movies including Hardball, Coach Carter and Real Steel. I have a movie coming out called Flight that stars Denzel Washington and is directed by Robert Zemeckis.

I also directed a movie I wrote called Dreamer, with Dakota Fanning and Kurt Russell.

Where and when do you write?

I write in the mornings in a little office above a hair salon in West Hollywood. My building is also connected to a synagogue and a fish restaurant.

Before having kids I used to write at home from midnight to 4 am. I loved that — the phone doesn’t ring. LA is very quiet at night; everything closes pretty early. Now if I’m not writing by 10am, I probably won’t write that day.

What software do you use?

workspaceI use Final Draft.

What hardware do you use?

A MacBook Air.

What (if anything) would you change?

If I could change anything it would be my stamina for the chair. Meaning, I used to be able to get in two three-hour writing sessions a day. Now a solid two hours is a good day.

Do something everyday, I try to tell myself. Just something everyday. Even if it’s just reading what you’ve written.

The forgotten fine print

General

Whitney Pastorek writes in praise of the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which reins in some egregious business practices:

The history of the credit card is fascinating, and I didn’t know much about it until I started researching. A few special moments stand out: Like how when the first general purpose credit cards started to appear in the late ‘50s, banks would simply mail them to people. None of this namby-pamby “you’re pre-qualified!” letter nonsense that keeps the U.S. Postal Service in business these days. They would just send the damn thing out, and you could go spend money you didn’t have, right then and there.

Credit cards are a for-profit business, but too often they’ve been used to trap even savvy consumers into never-ending loops of debt.

WGA Election results

WGA

Just came by email:

> The following eight members were elected to the WGAW’s Board of Directors: Chip Johannessen, Katherine Fugate, Michael Oates Palmer, John Aboud, Scott Alexander, David A. Goodman, Marjorie David, Kathy Kiernan.

Most of them have served on the board before, so in my 30-second analysis, it seems writers voted for experience. My congratulations to all of them.

Workspace: Michael Chabon

Workspace

michael chabon headshotWho are you and what do you write?

My name is Michael Chabon and mostly I write fiction. Five novels, a couple of novellas, short stories, essays. I have two screenwriting credits, for Spider-Man 2 and for John Carter, and a lot of unproduced or uncredited work.

My latest novel, TELEGRAPH AVENUE, is just out from HarperCollins.

Where and when do you write?

I mostly work in a studio behind my house in Berkeley, California, at night, from 10 PM to 3 (or 4) AM.

My wife and I have four children, which means that frequently I feel compelled to flee for a few days, a week, occasionally as long as two weeks, to try to bear down and get deeply immersed. Immersion in a project, in a house with four children, is all but unattainable.

What software do you use?

workspaceStarted out in 1983, using WordStar on an Osborne 1. Many gray years of Word. Tried what feels like dozens before settling down in recent years with Scrivener and Final Draft, making occasional resort to Pages.

But now I am in love with iA Writer. Its beauty and simplicity, its tight cloud integration, and its device agnosticism have me rapt. I used Writer to write an entire essay about Finnegans Wake on my iPad (and even, sitting at the DMV and the orthodontist, my iPhone).

Lately I have been moving, for screenwriting work, to Writer/Fountain/Highland.

What hardware do you use?

MacBook Pro, iMac, iPad, iPhone.

What (if anything) would you change?

I wish Scrivener had better cloud integration, and was spread beautifully across platforms the way Writer is. Writer is a sharp tool, but Scrivener is still, by far, the best app for organizing all the pieces of a big project like a novel.