Welcome To My Blog

I am going to try to keep the Monday through Friday blog info-mercial free, and keep the plugs to Saturday. That said, I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now and would love for you to know more about all of it. Here’s what’s coming up in 2011: 1. The Storyline Conference. If you attend one conference this year, come see us in Portland. The Storyline Conference was a smash hit last year and this year we are going to make it even better. The conference was inspiring to hundreds, and this year it will be inspiring to you. Register you and your cool friends here. Storyline Conference from shieldsfilms.com on Vimeo. 2. The Paperback to A Million Miles in a Thousand Years comes out next month. If you’ve been wanting to read it but don’t want to spend the hard-back dough, you’ve got your shot in a couple weeks. Buy one or a case or a truck load! They’re on the cheap, baby! 3. Blue Like Jazz the movie will hit theaters this fall. We are still a long way off, and we will certainly ramp up promotion leading up to the release, but stay tuned to [...]

Every so often I get asked to review somebody’s manuscript. And anymore, I won’t do it. I’ve had too many bad experiences. I’d assume writers want to be told what should be cut out of their book, but this isn’t the case. Only the good writers want to know what should be cut from their manuscripts. The amateurs just want to be told they are good. I had dinner with Max Lucado last year, and he said his editors sent back his latest book marked up in red. Can you imagine? Can you imagine telling Max he needed to change anything? I wouldn’t have the guts, much less the sensibilities to actually say what of his words aren’t terrific. But Max surrounds himself by editors who will tell him the hard truths. These are trusted friends, and they’ve been working with him for years. And they are also part of the reason he’s sold more than 60-million books. He said the latest rounds of edits were hard to take. He said he thought by now he’d be a “good writer.” But he took them in, he sat down, and he edited the book. I read Outlive Your Life on a [...]

Yesterday morning I caught the news story that the miners trapped in a Chilean mine will likely be rescued this week. It has been two months since the accident that trapped the miners more than a mile beneath the earth. They’ve been living in tight, extremely uncomfortable quarters ever since, while multiple attempts to rescue them have been underway. Families of the trapped men have set up camps around the rescue effort, cooking food that is sent down in small tubes through tiny shafts drilled for supplies. If everything goes as hopes, the men will be freed this week. A small rescue vessel will be lowered so the men can be freed one at a time. There will no doubt be difficulties, and likely their rescue will take days, perhaps even weeks. And yet according to reports, the men have not been arguing and fighting about who will go first, but rather, who will go last. The news report said the men have bonded in their time together, and a brotherhood has been created amongst the workers. It reminded me of that age-old truth in narrative, that character is only molded in conflict, and if you want your characters to [...]