I went to a screenwriting seminar last night taught by James Dalessandro, a working writer and teacher who has had over 500+ pitch meetings and selling 25 screenplays to Hollywood in about 21 years. The guy had some serious screenwriting street cred.

He just sold a screenplay called "1906", about the San Francisco earthquake, to Hollywood. His screenplay was the subject of a bidding war by the studios and sold for around half a million to Warner Brothers. Barry Levinson is directing the film.

The screenplay was based on a fictional novel he also wrote called "1906", which is due out in Spring 2004. Dalessandro said he thought the movie would outsell James Cameron's "Titanic".

He is currently in the process of creating some kind of TV show for Court TV called "Citizen Jane", which he says was paying $75,000 per episode. Dalessandro also went to the UCLA film school.

The seminar cheered me up considerably about my own writing and where I was in the process. Three things he said which struck me:

1. According to him, Aristotle said that "we cannot understand art before we understand its science." I love this because I was good at science and I'm very good at learning. Maybe one day I'll figure the writing thing out.

2. The best story to write is never the story you know, nobody cares and nobody is interested. I love this! I hate writing stories which too closely resemble my life. I don't want my private life opened up for criticism like that.

3. A character doesn't necessarily have to change or transform, but can just have a realization at the end of the story. I like this because real life is like that. Things happen in your life, and you don't always change. You get realizations, insights, maybe even epipanies, but you don't necessarily change your behaviour.