As one who believes everyone must find their own spiritual path, and who has found a decidedly unreligious spiritual path for myself, I must admit I found it amusing when you said: “My mother and sister thought I had found the Lord, but actually I was trying to research a potential bestseller.” That’s a keeper.

I’m fascinated to hear how you came to write this story. Thanks for sharing it with us. And it’s a great lesson in what to do with those ideas that wake you in the middle of the night – or what not do with them.

You know, I was glad to see that you got the idea in the middle of the night, basically out of nowhere. I have not yet come up with an idea during my waking hours as far as I can remember. The very basis for every script or novel I’ve got in my head now came to me in the middle of the night interrupting my sleep or when I awoke in the morning.

My only hope is that it doesn’t take me 30 years to bring it from mind to page!

Congratulations again sir!

Take Care,
Chris

The series by Hal lindsey are some of my favorite books. However if your interested in the end times you have to read Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins “Left Behind” series. After reading their books on the bible’s life after the rapture, I knew that I could never write a book on the Bible’s last days. They have done to good of a job. There is nothing left to write.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who has ideas for books that I’m not ready to write. It’s hard to push aside the stories, but I know I couldn’t do them justice yet. Although, I suppose it’s like parenthood. If we waited until we felt truly prepared, we’d never have kids.

All in good fun, ofcourse.

Greetings,

Martijn

Will be anxiously awaiting the second half of this post.

With that said, my first attempt to write a novel was unsuccessful, in that it was uncompleted … The theme, inspired by Brown’s success, was religious in nature and centered around the anti-Christ. The more I thought about it, I discovered it’s just too big a subject for me to tackle in my rookie outing so I trashed the 200+ pages I wrote – plus, I was lost with no clear definition of story structure at the time.

My failure made me realize that my dream of becoming a novelist, and screenwriter, is not going to happen overnight … despite my wildest fantasies. Even after a close study of Larry Brooks’ and Syd Field’s story paradigms, my current talent level is not where it needs to be to execute a story of that magnitude. My only option … practice practice practice at the cost of my standard of living.

Despite graduating from the number-one business school in Florida, I will continue to work part-time, at a job that is in no way intellectually engaging, just to have the time to practice the craft I’ve embraced.

My question to Mr. Brooks: what do you think of the USC and UCLA film schools, specifically, their Screenwriting MFA programs? Are the programs, assuming I can gain admission, the next best thing to winning a prestigious screenwriting competition? What about lesser screenwriting programs, and the Creative Writing programs of schools such as Cornell, Brown and NYU?

Thank you for your time and response.