The great novelist J.D. Salinger got a lot of things right. Among them, he wrote that one of the only questions that will be asked of us when we die is this: Were most of your stars out? Now, obviously, no one can know God’s plans for us. And I am sure I have readers […]
None of us has time or words to spare, when you really think about it. Our lives on the planet are brief, and our opportunities to impact others are not infinite. Given this, I want to share three ways I believe you can truly move people when you interact with them, whether in your personal […]
There are plenty of resources that provide advice on delivering a speech and which focus on organizing the material, providing visuals, selecting a topic and being a commanding presence. My advice is more ambitious: What keys make a speech something that changes people, in meaningful ways, within the scope of 20 or 30 or 60 […]
There’s plenty of good advice there for fiction writers. Some of it, by the way, is contained in the work of the late Gary Provost (www.garyprovost.com), who created the Video Novel Workshop. The workshop is now available as a free download, but I bought that series of DVDs from Gary for about $60 when he […]
I still remember about 12 years ago, sitting with my television agent Greg Lipstone at a sandwich shop in Los Angeles. Greg was one of the heads of television for the mega-entertainment agency William Morris. We had a few meetings scheduled with television show runners to talk about a drama series I had thought up, […]
A crisis is a disruption in one’s life story, whether the particular disruption is personal, professional or political. That’s why every crisis requires creative vision, in order to emerge with as little damage as possible—or, preferably, stronger than ever. In the midst of the crisis, it can be difficult to see the possibility of surviving […]
Starting a business has an inevitable element of storytelling to it. First of all, it all starts with an idea, just like a novel does. The idea is an answer to this question: “What if?” Here are three examples: • What if people could . . . ? • What if cell phones could . […]
For executives, authors, attorneys or anyone who is not a veteran of on-camera work, it can be daunting when a news event or a publicity tour means going in front of the camera. Sitting in a small room for a satellite interview, with an earpiece in your ear and a video camera lens pointed at […]
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. –Pablo Picasso One of the joys of writing my six psychological thrillers, featuring forensic psychiatrist Frank Clevenger was when my editor would say, “I don’t know if Frank […]
In my view, being human means having the capacity to experience and to give love (often, through a miracle called human empathy) and to reason and make choices. It also means having the opportunity to embrace the truth about oneself, including one’s life story, back to its early chapters, in order to make sense of […]