Tonight I listened to a 3-hour seminar on writing given by Stephen J. Cannell. He's the guy who came up with all those TV shows like Wise Guy, The Rockford Files, Hunter, etc. He's also written and published 10 novels.

Cannell started out by saying he is severely dyslexic, but it didn't stop him from being the successful Hollywood writer he is today. He writes five hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, even on vacation. The guy is definitely a workaholic. When he's working on a novel, he writes a chapter a day.

Because of his dyslexia, Cannell writes with a selectric typewriter, then has his secretaries type the pages into a computer document. He said that David E. Kelly, creator of Ally McBeal and The Practice, writes all his episodes in long hand.

In the middle of listening to his seminar, I realized what was wrong with my second screenplay and why I was having such a hard time finishing it. Thank you Mr. Cannell.

Cannell said you know you're a professional writer, when you can finish your writing projects whether they're good or bad.

My revised second screenplay definitely sucks. It's not fully developed, my second act drags, it's too talky and I don't show enough. And I think deep down I knew it, but I didn't know why. And even if I knew what was wrong, I didn't have enough skills in craft of storytelling to fix it last year.

Now I know, but I would have to completely replot my whole screenplay to fix it and start over from the beginning.

So I'll finish the sucky second version of my screenplay, just to practice the art of finishing my work. Afterwards, I'll rewrite another outline, treatment and beat sheet, and start what I hope will be a third and final rewrite.

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.

I have my modern art history mid term tonight.

Does it really matter that I know by heart Harold Rosenberg's theory on abstract expressionism - action painting?

Does anyone still care about Harold Rosenberg's abstract expressionism - colour field theory, or any of the art that came out of this movement?

Will I get extra points at a cocktail party because I can tell you the similarities and differences between Ab-Ex Action and Ab-Ex Colour Field?

What about extra points for knowing the differences and similarities between Ab-Ex New York and Art Informel in Europe?

I received a hooded sweatshirt from BloggerPro today. Should I wear it out? Do I want random strangers to know I have a blog? Does the general population even know what a blog is?