Podcast: Download (Duration: 48:57 — 39.9MB)
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
How can you audit your writing process so you get more words on the page and finish your books? How can you network at author conferences, even if you’re an introvert? T.D. Donnelly shares tips from 30 years as a Hollywood screenwriter and his book, Superdraft.
In the intro, memento mori, and updated dates for AI webinars.
This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn
T.D. Donnelly is a bestselling thriller author, and he’s been a professional screenwriter in Hollywood for 30 years. His first book for authors is Superdraft: The Art and Science of Better, Faster Writing.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
- How to network at author conferences, and why it works for introverts
- The difference between craft and process, and how to audit your own writing process
- Balancing the creator and the critic at each phase of writing
- Dictation tips for getting words on the page with AI tools
- What the rules of improv can teach you about writing
- How to bring a professional mindset to your writing
You can find Tom at TDDonnelly.com.
Transcript of interview with T.D. Donnelly
Jo: T.D. Donnelly is a bestselling thriller author, and he’s been a professional screenwriter in Hollywood for 30 years, which we talked about on our previous episode in March 2025. His first book for authors is Superdraft: The Art and Science of Better, Faster Writing. So welcome back to the show, Tom.
Tom: It’s great to be here, Jo. Great to talk to you again.
Jo: Yes, indeed. Well, give us a bit of an update, because when we spoke last, and it was only, I guess, 18 months ago, you’d just launched Year of the Rabbit. I read it, and it was a fantastic book, but it was your first novel even though you’re so experienced. So give us an update.
How has your career developed, and what have you learned about launching and books?
Tom: Oh God, what have I learned? Have I learned anything, I think, would be the fairer question.
So I’m still a screenwriter. I still have a day job in Hollywood. It’s been a rough time in Hollywood, but I still get the occasional job there.
So my plan, in the first two or three years of my novel career, to put out six books has not quite gotten to six. I do have three out. I have Year of the Rabbit, I have Year of the Horse, and I have Year of the Serpent, and I should have Year of the Dragon out by Christmas. So that part has gone well.
Now, I have a lot of people that I’ve met through this community that know a lot more than I do, and I have to rely on them for learning about marketing, things like that.
In Hollywood, nobody wants to ask a screenwriter about marketing questions. They have a whole department with hundreds of people in it that are in charge of all of that sort of stuff.
The advice that I got overwhelmingly was, “Don’t even bother doing paid ads until you have three books out.” Because the odds of them being able to pay off and make sense aren’t there. So I have just started advertising this year, and everyone has said this is a really, really bad year to be starting advertising.
Everything is in flux. Everything is in question. What is going on with Facebook? What is going on with Amazon? Why are the things that we were doing not working anymore?
I have found a modest level of success with my ads, which I’m very, very happy about. I’m happy that at least I’m doing slightly better than breaking even on the ads, and I’m getting a lot more signups to my newsletter, which I have to admit has been… how would I put this? Inconsistent.
I will say I have an inconsistent newsletter. My New Year’s resolution for this whole year is to get more consistent with it.
I am loving it. The books have been very well reviewed. Year of the Rabbit was the one that I spent so much time just making it perfect. Then the next two I was able to do a little bit faster, and people seem to really love the series and to see these characters evolving. So I’m having a great time. That’s all I can say.
Jo: Well, I think you’re doing the things that are the right things to do. You’re writing books in a series, which is one of those things that everyone says you should do, and in fact, many of us do.
I’ve certainly never been very good at doing multiple books in a series one after the other. I tend to start a series and then start another series, and then another series, and then maybe write a second book.
So you’ve done things in a really good order, and I hope people are encouraged. I mean, you have 30 years, like we say, in Hollywood.
I’ve read Year of the Rabbit. I know you can write. But that’s not the only challenge, and I think that is so important in an age of AI, because whether or not anyone agrees that AI could ever write a book, the writing of the book is only one part of the journey, right, as you have discovered.
Tom: Absolutely.
Jo: Actually reaching readers is a real challenge.
Tom: Oh my God, it’s so hard. Just read a gosh darn book. This book’s great. You’re going to love it, okay?
I have a once-a-week golf outing with some old friends of mine, and there’s three of us, and the golf course we play on likes to go out with fivesomes, so they generally pair us up with one or two more people.
The number of times we have finished a round and I have not sold a book to one of the poor two hapless people that are paired with us… my friends are just like, “Oh my God, there he goes again. Oh my God. What, did he make it to the third hole before he started pitching them the book?”
It is one of those things, and it’s not easy to be good at writing a book and good at writing ad copy. These are very different hats you have to wear. Not everybody can be great at them.
That is why I think your advocacy for “let’s see what AI can do for us in these realms”, to maybe help us with the things we’re not so good at, I think is really key.
Jo: Oh, good. Right. Well, one thing you have been incredibly good at is pitching and speaking and networking at author events. You’ve spoken at lots of author conferences over the last few years. I’ve seen you speak.
You give a lot to authors, but also you’ve done a really good job at networking and becoming part of the community. There’s a lot of writers who feel like that’s something they want to do. Maybe they’ve written a book that would help other authors, but they just don’t know how to break in.
Now, I realise part of that is personality. You’re a friendly guy, right?
What tips do you have around networking and pitching, and how has that helped you?
Tom: It’s really funny. I’ve been talking to some writers. I was just speaking at NINC, and then before that at SPS Live in London, and at both conferences it came up. “You’ve only been in this business for two years, Tom, and you know everybody, and everybody knows you. How did you get to do that?”
Then I start talking to people about networking, and it’s like I’m speaking a foreign language to them. I guess in Hollywood you kind of have to. You’re trained up. It’s a relationship business. You have to have the goods. You have to be a great writer, but that alone… great writers fail in Hollywood all the time because they can’t do that.
So eventually I will have to do a talk at one of these conferences about networking. So here’s one thing that I do, which is going to sound mental. First of all, every conference I go to, I come up with three goals. What are my three goals? What are the three things that I want to accomplish going to this conference?
In the beginning they were all very me, me, me goals because I needed a lot of help, and I still do.
So I went to a conference, a conference where I met you actually, and said, “I’m going to find writers that are in my genre, and I’m going to pitch them and ask them if they would consider reading the book, and if they like the book, to blurb it.”
I wanted to get professional blurbs, and you were very kind to give me a fantastic blurb that is on the cover of one of my books.
Jo: Only because it was a good book, by the way, for anyone listening. I don’t normally do that, and I said that to you.
Tom: No, and I said it in the pitch. I said, “Listen, if you don’t love it, do not even worry about it. It’s going to be absolutely fine.” Jo is not a blurb factory, people. Do not bother her, okay?
Anyway, so I put together these three goals, and then once I have those three goals I think, “Okay, how am I going to approach those goals?” So before I’ve even gone to the conference… and what I do, it’s a weird thing. Do you know the app called Anki, A-N-K-I?
Jo: No.
Tom: It’s this tiny little free app that basically allows you to make flashcards for yourself, and you can test yourself with these flashcards. People use it for language learning all the time.
I get pictures of people that are speaking at the conferences I’m going to that I don’t know, and for about a week or two before the conference I flash those pictures twice a day on the screen, and I have to be able to identify who they are, something interesting about them, and something that they’ve written.
It’s one of those repetitive things where if I got it right away, then I don’t need to see that card again for the next 10 minutes. If I didn’t get it, that card goes right back into the slot. So I get to be on a first-name basis with a person I haven’t met yet.
So when I go to these conferences, I feel more comfortable because, oh, I know you, and oftentimes they’ll be like, “Have we met?” I’m like, “No, we haven’t, but I think you’re fantastic. This book looks really interesting. I haven’t read it yet, I’m sorry to say, but I’m dying to take a look at it.”
That helps break the ice. I’ve tried this with introverts—I am not an introvert—and they have said that it is way more powerful for introverts than it is for extroverts, because breaking the ice is the hardest thing, and if you know something about someone, you have a starting-off point to talk to them. Does that make sense?
Jo: Oh, that is genius. It’s so interesting, and I’m so glad you mentioned that. I’ve done this before as well, and still do at various things. I will look at the speaker list and I will look at their website or whatever, and I just take screenshots on my phone so that I have that there.
Then, like you say, if there’s somebody I want to meet, I will practise. Even sometimes I’ve been at conferences, I’ve seen somebody is there who maybe I didn’t even expect, and then I will duck into a toilet stall or something and I will go look them up.
I’ll often go look on their social media to see what they’ve been talking about, maybe something today or yesterday. Then I can use that, and then I’ll go out, and I’ll have something prepared. As an introvert, as you say, going up to people and just trying to strike up conversation is extremely hard.
So I love that you mention that, and I really hope that helps people listening.
In terms of how you got to speak, is that really because you have the Hollywood background?
As people immediately, like I did, go, “Oh, okay. You have some chops here.” So you leaned on your other career, basically.
Tom: I think so, yes. So three years ago we were in the middle of a Hollywood writers’ strike here, and for 10 months I couldn’t write movies or television. They shut us out, and it just happened to be when I had two kids in college. So lovely, wonderful. Perfect timing for that.
I was really starting to worry about no money coming in, only money going out, and then I decided I was going to write the first book in what is now a series.
I met this community, first at the last 20Books Vegas, and then at all the conferences since. You guys were so welcoming to me, you included me. You were so welcoming and positive and encouraging that I really feel a debt to you guys, because you are a second family.
I say that all the time. You are my second family, and it is a found family that I’ve discovered in the last three years. So I just want to give back as much as I can.
It turns out being a Hollywood screenwriter means a lot to a lot of people, but you still have to sing for your supper. You still have to prove it. But people hear “Hollywood screenwriter” and think, “Well, this person probably knows something about writing,” having done it for 31 years now.
The interesting thing that most people don’t know is that screenwriters are forced to talk about craft and defend their craft in a way most novelists never have to.
Novelists have, if you’re traditionally published, an editor or two that gives them feedback, and that’s about all the feedback they get. Indies, we get feedback from beta readers, from people like that as well, but once again, not a ton of feedback.
In screenwriting, oh boy, everybody who reads that script is going to be in a development meeting, sitting around a corporate boardroom table with billionaires saying, “Why are we spending so much money on this? Tell me what the hell is going on.”
They’re going to challenge everything. They’re going to tell you that they want to cut this, and you know that cutting this is going to destroy the story.
Can you explain why? Can you defend it? Can you talk about character? Can you talk about character arcs? Can you talk about thematic constraints? Can you talk about the setups and payoffs in a way that these people that are barely literate can understand?
It turns out that makes for a person that can give a really good presentation on things like craft, on story.
Jo: Yes, and just for people listening, of course it’s kind of obvious that your background would be relevant. So I just want to encourage people to pitch based on their background.
So for example, I had a wonderful lady, Johanna Rothman, on this show a while back now. When I met Johanna, she was like, “I’m project manager, business, entrepreneurial,” the management side of being an author, managing all these different tasks we have to do.
I was like, “Great, I want to talk to you about project management for authors and that kind of thing.” So I had her on the show to talk about that. I’ve got someone coming on who’s an expert in change management, and we’re going through a lot of change. So I feel like anyone listening—
You can take what you do in your daily life, and you can apply that to the author environment.
That can be useful, right? As you’ve discovered, there’s a whole load of things that are useful.
Tom: Absolutely. Yes. Sing for your supper. Our community is what I call stone soup. You know the myth of stone soup, where you put a stone in there, and everyone else is like, “Oh, the stone is going to make a magic soup.”
Yes, but we need a few things, so you go and get some ramps or some onions, and you go out and get some carrots, and then we all put in.
Of course, the stone has nothing to do with the soup, right? But the community that we have and the richness of it is the conglomeration of all the little unique things that we bring and put into it. That we all do.
So put things into it. You introverts, you’ve got to put yourself out there because you have a lot to share, and it’s really worthwhile.
Jo: Oh, yes, for sure. Right. Well, let’s talk about your book, Superdraft. What I found interesting is you say this is a process book (I guess you’d say “prah-cess”, but I would say “pro-cess”) rather than a writing craft book. I found this really interesting because it feels like you were making a point of this.
So what do you mean by a process book, and how can people audit their process in order to improve?
Tom: The vast majority of books you will read on writing are about, when you are writing, how to make the things that you’re writing artistically valid and meaningful and better.
Process is the nuts and bolts of how you get yourself up in the morning, sit down, or maybe in my case I don’t sit down, I walk, but write those words, get those words down, and do the thing that is writing. That is what the process is.
There are very, very few books on process. There’s Julia Cameron. Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones. Those are books on process. It’s very hard to find books that are specifically about what we do to write. Not what we do when we write, but what we do to write, and that is how I would define process.
Jo: So how can authors examine what their process is in order to improve it?
Tom: So I think first what we have to recognise is there’s a reason that there are so many books about craft and so few about process. That’s because if I told you that I have this great craft tip, you would, with no emotion whatsoever, look at it, listen to it, and potentially incorporate it into the next thing that you write.
If I tell you, however, that I want you to change your process, how you actually write, I see the deer-in-the-headlights look on people’s faces when they’re like, “Wait, what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” and that’s because writing is very, very hard. What we do is incredibly difficult.
There is a German author, Thomas Mann, who said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for the average person,” and I think that’s absolutely true. Writing is more difficult for a writer than it is for a normal person because everything means something to us. It’s important.
If I asked a non-writer to write 20,000 words, and you get paid $10,000 when you have those 20,000 words done, I would almost always get a manuscript within two or three days.
If you tell a writer to do that, oh my goodness. Because, “Oh, but somebody’s going to read it. It can’t just be anything. It’s got to be good. It’s got to be this. It’s got to be that.”
I use an example: which is harder, running a marathon or writing a novel? And we have experience on this, right? I talked to marathon coaches, and they say 70% of the people who start a marathon finish a marathon.
We have stats from NaNoWriMo, rest in peace, that say 11% of people who start NaNoWriMo finish the novel. That is six times harder than it is to run a marathon. That’s how hard it is, and that’s all emotion, right?
There are physical things that are going to stop you from running a marathon. There’s nothing physical, for almost anybody nowadays, especially with all the different ways we can write, stopping you from writing.
So the key to process is going to be to get the mental and emotional roadblocks that are keeping you from your best way through this process out of the way so that you can write.
I think it comes down to the two parts of the brain that operate when we’re writing. I call them the two voices, the creator and the critic, and finding a way to harness both of them is very, very difficult.
Jo: Okay, well then—
Let’s get into some of those roadblocks that might be stopping people.
Tom: Sure. So, you are a discovery writer.
Jo: Mm-hmm.
Tom: In Hollywood terms, I am a discovery writer. In novel terms, I am very much still a plotter. In Hollywood you can’t be a pantser really. You really can’t do that, but I’m as close to a pantser as you can be and work in Hollywood.
I will hit a point in the outlining process where I’m like, “I know enough. Can I please just write? Can I please not outline anymore and just write?” Sometimes they accept that, and sometimes they don’t. But I would say that what these two things really are is which of those two voices is more dominant in your process.
For a discovery writer like yourself, you guys are great with that creator voice, that quiet, soft voice that is saying, “Go, try it, try it. Just let it flow. It’s going to come. Don’t you worry. I’m going to feed you when you need to be fed, but you’re not going to know what it is right now.”
You guys can write that way, and write forward, and write beautiful, amazing things.
Whereas for me, I need to see the buoys coming ahead so I know that I’m still in the channel. I need to have some amount of a road to follow in order to write.
That’s the critic voice being in there saying, “Nope, nope. You’re going off the path again. Nope, that’s not good enough. No, you can’t do that.”
Both are valid, and I think in an ideal writing process for anybody, what we really want to get to is a place where both voices get their turn at bat, so to speak. I don’t know. Am I using a baseball metaphor to a Brit? I apologise.
Jo: Cricket. I’ll assume it was cricket.
Tom: Yes, cricket. Exactly. There you go. Cricket. Step up to the wicket, right?
You need to use both of those voices. To some degree when I call myself a plotter, I am saying that I am going to be a heavy critic-voice process. When you say you’re a discovery writer, “I am going to be a heavy creator-led process.”
For most people, I think that the ideal process later on, when you experiment and you try things, is actually a process that is a little more balanced. I think plantser is the term we use, right? Plantser is not quite a plotter and not quite a pantser. You’re in between.
I think an ideal process is where both voices get their turn to speak, get their turn to share, and we’ve made peace with the voice we’re less comfortable listening to. Make sense?
Jo: Yes, I think it makes sense. Screenwriters, obviously you have to be a lot more controlled, I guess, because you’re writing for money, and you’re generally writing on someone else’s dime, and you need to get that done.
I feel like for a lot of us as writers, that’s not where we start.
For most people, you don’t start writing books as a job like that.
It’s not something that happened at the beginning. I know it doesn’t happen for many beginning screenwriters as well.
Tom: You make it sound so sordid. “I know that you’re writing for money. You’re writing for money. You’re out there in the street peddling your wares.”
Jo: No, but that’s a good thing. Well, you know I’m not saying it like that.
Tom: No, I know.
Jo: I would also say to people, it depends on the book. So for example, right now I’m doing my fourth edition of How to Market a Book.
Now, this is not an intuitive, discovery-written book. It is nuts and bolts, it is chapter by chapter, and it is very useful, and I’ve done a survey, and it is writing to my market for sure.
I’m still enjoying it. I can still get in places of flow, but it is not my fun, intuitive discovery writer process, which I will do next.
The next book I am just indulging myself with, and I’m sure it will not sell as many copies.
Tom: Don’t say that. Don’t manifest that. Come on. Just let it be what it’s going to be.
Jo: Oh, no. I’m trying to encourage people that you can do both on different books as well.
Tom: Absolutely. I believe that you should do both on every book you write, but the key is not that we’re going to write this book using just the creator and this book just using the critic. No, it’s actually both.
The only problem is that when the critic voice is operating, you cannot hear the creator. That is the real problem. The creator is very quiet, and the critic is a loud, drunken jerk, and it is very, very hard to hear them both at the same time, if not impossible.
So really what Superdraft is about is separating the writing process into phases. Creator-led phases like brainstorming and the actual drafting, and critic-led phases like outlining.
Stay with me, discovery writers. You don’t have to outline a lot. You don’t even have to outline at all if you don’t want to.
If you wanted to do a very, very minor outlining step, I have the smallest outlining step known to man in the book that you could use if you wanted to. And then editing, obviously, is a critic-led phase as well.
The reason so many people start writing a book and don’t finish it is that the wrong voice starts talking during the wrong part of the process. And more often than not, for a lot of people, that’s the critic. The critic runs rampant.
The critic comes in when the creator is supposed to have the talking stick, so to speak. There are ways that I’ve found over the years, through painful trial and error, to stop the critic in their tracks and to give the creator their due.
Jo: I feel like a lot of the time we talk about these things, and it’s just assumed that it’s easy to get words on the page and then edit them later. So tell us—
How do you write at the moment, and what are some tips for people who might be struggling to get words on the page?
Tom: Absolutely. All right. So I will say that this is not a book about dictation, but I am a little dictator here in Hollywood.
I go at 6:00 AM to the beach. I walk for between an hour and three hours if things are going really, really well. My bare feet are walking in the surf, up and down Santa Monica and Venice Beach, and I dictate the next chapter, or chapters, of the novel as I go.
What I do is the night before, either on a notes app on my phone or on a little index card, right before I go to bed, I will write the five things I know that I’m going to be writing about tomorrow. Just a little sketch so I know what I’m doing.
I do that for two reasons. One is, I don’t know if you dictate, Jo, but sometimes when you dictate you’re like, “I have no idea what happens next. I’m lost a little bit,” right?
Since there’s no keyboard, because there’s no screen in front of you, you can get a little lost, and having that little note card to give you, “Oh, I can just move on to the next bullet point and keep going,” can be very helpful for that.
Also I do that because I want to control something called my daily debris, and your daily debris is what your dreams tend to be made of. The last things you think about and worry about and stress about, and sometimes just think about, for the last half hour before you go to sleep tend to be the things we dream about.
If you get in a little dream practice and you practise writing down your dreams when you wake up, you will find that you start to recall your dreams in great and vivid detail.
Oftentimes, if the last thing you’re doing before you go to bed is writing down the next things that happen, you’re kind of dreaming your novel in front of you. Just as a tiny little tip, and by the way, this is one of the more out-there, woo-woo tips that I have. I have a lot more normal, basic, boots-on-the-ground tips as well.
So that is how I write, and oftentimes my pace is somewhere around 3,000 words an hour dictating on that beach.
I’m getting my endorphins, I’m getting my negative ions, I’m getting my relaxation, I’m getting my exercise in at the same time as writing, I would say on average, 5,000 words, 6,000 words a morning before anybody has even started their workday, which can be a real, real help.
The great thing about dictation, and the thing I tell everybody with this, is when you’re drafting, your enemy is the delete key, the backspace key. That is the key of the editor, and we don’t want the editor when we’re drafting. We want the creator only to be what we’re focused on.
It was so bad for me that I used to have to tape, with double-stick tape, a thumbtack upside down on the backspace key.
Jo: On the backspace. That’s a good tip too.
Just coming back to dictation, I have actually had a bit of a breakthrough on this, because I’ve tried dictation so many times over the last 15, 20 years I’ve been writing books. I’ve talked to Kevin J. Anderson. I’ve done all the courses. I tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I tried everything.
Then what has happened, really only in the last couple of months, is—
As the AI tools have gotten so much better, what I now do is I just talk to an app on my phone.
I used to try and do sentences. I used to try and do punctuation. You know, open quote, “Hello Tom,” comma, close quote, said Jo, full stop, new line. You used to have to do that.
Tom: Yes.
Jo: Now with the AI tools, you can just say whatever the hell you like. You can do a bit of dialogue, and then I give it to Claude and say, “Can you just tidy this up and add in the punctuation?”
Then of course I will go through and edit it. I’m like, “Don’t change anything, just tidy it up.” It is so much easier. So that has actually really helped me, and I’ve started to do that again.
Tom: Oh, it’s a game changer for sure. The thing that you said last is the most important. Do not change anything. Do not change any words. Just format it. The only words you’re allowed to change is if I say, “Scratch that,” then you can figure out what I meant to scratch and scratch that.
Jo: Oh, I don’t do that. I just leave it all. “Scratch that” I think is from the old dictation days. You could do that.
Tom: Yes.
Jo: I think now you can just record, and the transcription is saved as it is. So you can just have the plain transcription if you want.
Tom: Sure.
Jo: This is essentially free now, and you can do it just on an app. Even just on an app on your phone that’s native on your device. You don’t even have to be using an AI service that goes to the cloud if you’re worried about that.
I would just encourage people, if you’re like me and you have tried so many times to get into dictation and you just haven’t been able to because you’re more of an intuitive flow creator, this is a new way. So hopefully people will try that.
Tom: 100%. Let me just say real quick, because you’re talking about doing it cheaply, for all the people out there that are like, “Well, I don’t want to spend a lot of money,” I use Voice Memos, which, as Jo was talking about, is the absolutely free app that comes with your iPhone. That’s what I record on.
I do the transcription with something called MacWhisper, which is a $40 one-time purchase. You never have to pay a monthly fee. It is $40, and it’s the Whisper model, which is one of the best transcription models out there.
Then for, like, a nickel, I put it into ChatGPT or Claude and have it clean up the thing. So it could not be cheaper. I just wanted to echo that for you.
Jo: Yes, just a game changer, really.
Another thing you mention in the book that made me smile was improv, and it made me smile because I have literally booked and cancelled improv classes almost every year for years, because I’m like, “Oh, I really should do that. That sounds like a great idea,” and then I end up cancelling it, because it freaks me out.
What can we learn from improv? Why did you put that in the book?
Tom: Well, okay, so over the 30 years… I didn’t even mention this, but I told you the last time we were talking that I sold the very first script that I ever wrote, which is a huge blessing. I count it among my blessings all the time.
It also was a problem because I was suddenly thrust into Hollywood, and I was thrust into these meetings and these pitch meetings before I was ready to, right?
So I had a year or two there where every time I went in to pitch, I just didn’t know how to do it, and every time I had to write an outline, I didn’t really know what they were looking for. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing.
The feedback in Hollywood is absolutely brutal. Just absolutely awful. So I had tremendous imposter syndrome and tremendous writer’s block for years and years and years, and I was looking for any way to get out of that.
I’ve done stand-up comedy, Jo. I’ve done stand-up comedy at the Comedy Store, the famous Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard.
Jo: Oh.
Tom: I’ve done a lot of things to get out of my own head, and I found improv to be one of the best ways to really free up those creative impulses in you and just throw things out there and have faith that they’re going to be great.
The rules of improv are amazing for writing. They should be taught when we teach writing, right? The first rule of improv is say yes. Just say yes. Because when you say no, you stop the flow of the scene. You stop the flow of the moment. Yes, absolutely.
Second rule, say “yes, and”. Don’t just say yes, because while yes is welcoming more input, it’s not adding anything to the process. So “yes, and”. Always be iterating forward, right?
Third rule of improv, make statements. Put your flag in the sand and declare things, right? Create things. Do not equivocate. State things. Make things. You can always change it later. It’s not a big deal. By the way, you can’t always change things later in improv, but you can in writing, so I’m using this specifically that way.
Number four, be specific, right? Clarity, specificity, detail, those are the things that our creative mind grabs onto and iterates off of. If you’re generic and bland, your writing is going to wither and die when you’re trying to do it.
Rule five is the here and now. Be present. Be here. Don’t be writing backstory when you should be writing what the characters are feeling and experiencing right here in this moment. Be here now.
Rule six, establish a location. A little less important for writers. That’s really for people that are trying to get an audience to imagine the space around them. But still, it fits for that as well, right?
Don’t do the white room. Make sure that you’ve described where you are. What does it smell like? What does it feel like? What is the weather like?
Improv rule number seven, change, change, change. Constantly be looking for the thing to change. How many novels have you read where you just wish people would get on with it and get to the next thing that happens? Oh my God, I would love that.
Eight is play the relationship. Bring it back to character. Bring it back to the relationship between these people, because that is the great stuff.
Then nine, which is, there are no mistakes, only opportunities, which is less a rule and more of a motto. There are no mistakes, only opportunities.
Imagine if you went to your next writing session with that firmly in your mind, and you believed that there are no mistakes, only opportunities. How much more free-flowing would your writing be? Absolutely amazing.
Jo: Yes, I’m going to have to just book another improv class.
Tom: You’re going to book a class, and you’re going to fricking take it, all right? I will be your accountability partner here.
Jo: It does make me laugh though, because every time I hear somebody like you say this stuff, I’m like, “Yes, I’m going to go do it. Yes, and I’m going to do it.” So you never know, but just to encourage people, I feel like there’s a lot of things there that can help.
The other thing you have in the book, which I thought was interesting, is a chapter on amateurs and pros. Steven Pressfield’s book, Turning Pro, is a book I often reread, and of course, he’s come out of screenwriting as well. So I thought that was an interesting parallel, that you have it too.
So give us a few of the differences that you think between amateurs and pros, and again, why include that?
Tom: For me there’s no better praise word that I use than pro. I’m like, “Oh, that’s a pro right there. Look at that. Did you read that? That’s amazing. Oh, man, that’s a real pro.”
Which is weird because I love the word amateur. You’re doing it for the love of it, right? Whereas pro is you’re professing it. It’s a different thing.
When you really think about it, an amateur, to do it for the love of it, that’s a very internal thing, right? That’s a very, almost self-seeking thing.
Whereas a professional, a person that’s professing, or what I call my writing as a vocation, so to vocate, to say, to get those things out, is a very sharing, a very other-centred experience. So I think it’s a really good way to look at the process.
I think amateurs, for the most part, are paranoid about their ideas. They’re very, very precious about their ideas, and they hide them. They’re like Sméagol or Gollum. “My precious, my precious. I have this and I can’t share it.”
Pros are telling people their ideas all the time, right? They are sharing their ideas and getting feedback from other pros. “Oh, wow, that’s really great. Hey, have you ever thought about this?” And boom, yep, it goes right in there.
You know, Oscar Wilde said, “Oh, I wish I’d thought of that.” And someone said, “Don’t worry, Oscar, you will.”
We steal, right? But we don’t really steal. We share. We share, and when a person shares back with us, we take it, we incorporate it, we put it into our process. Ideas that are held and kept in the dark often die, and ideas that are shared and talked about often blossom and bloom.
Another thing—amateurs usually gild the first draft.
They spend so much time just perfecting that first draft. I don’t know about you, but I fell prey to this.
In my early career, the number of times I wrote the first act of my screenplay versus the number of times I wrote the third act of the screenplay had to be 10 or 20 to one. I just wanted to get it perfect before I moved on to the next section. Perfection, oh my God, what a creativity-draining trap is the word perfection.
Pros lay down the draft fast, and they put their faith in the rewrite. They put their faith in getting a good enough draft that they can see where it is, and they can read it and get a full view of the entire story.
Another one—amateurs often love what they wrote. Now, this one I like about amateurs. I like the fact that you write something and you read it, and you don’t think, “Oh, God, I’ve got a lot of work to do here.”
Pros, we almost never reach a place of absolute love, right? Sometimes we do. But oftentimes, the critic, who we have a good relationship with because we’re professionals, is going to tell us, “You know we can do better here, right?”
Was it da Vinci who said… or Michelangelo… “A great artist never finished, only abandoned.” Or was it Picasso? I can’t remember. So an artist said that, and I think that’s absolutely true for professionals.
We’re always trying to improve things just a little bit, and that could be a trap for the pros, right? Sometimes we don’t get our work out as early as we should be getting it out because we’re not quite ready to let go of it yet.
Then last but not least, amateurs treat a major change like it’s a death sentence. Whereas pros look at a big idea that’s going to change a lot of what we just wrote as, “Oh, wow, this is fantastic. What a great opportunity.” Because we’re not precious about what we’ve written as much as we are looking forward to what this can be.
Make sense?
Jo: I think it’s a really interesting way to think about things. As you were talking, another difference, I think, coming back to money, is amateurs are maybe not even intending to make any money with their book.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing a book because you want to write a book, and you love writing, and you just want to hold your book in your hand and say, “I made this.”
To me, the amateur doing it for the love of it is where I think a lot of us perhaps should be. That should be the thing.
If you’re a professional, there does have to be some aspect of business.
As you say, it needs to go out to somebody else. It needs to get to a certain professional point and be paid for.
So I think that is a difference, and these things can shape decisions around everything, not just the craft, but also the marketing and your brand and everything really.
Tom: Yes, obviously you are correct in the standard definition of amateur and pro. I’m really talking about amateurs versus pros in terms of mindset, and that’s a very different thing.
You could do exactly what you’re talking about. “I’m just writing this for me. I don’t know if anybody in the world except me wants to read this, but I’m going to write it.” You can still write it as a professional. You can still take a professional mindset, right?
With embracing major change, with not being so precious with that first draft, with sharing the idea and getting feedback. All of those things that pros do, you can do, and write something that is purely for the love of it, and you have no commercial prospects for this whatsoever.
You can still do that and be a professional in the mindset sense, and that’s really where I focus. That’s the key to me.
If you are writing because you love it, if you are writing because you want to make a million dollars, I’m agnostic as far as that goes. I say the reasons that you write are yours, and whatever they are, that’s fantastic.
Just don’t rule out the possibility that someone else might want to read and might fall in love with this amazing thing that you’re not sure you want to send to another soul, right? Share of yourself with the world, and the world gets richer. That’s what I believe.
Jo: Fantastic.
So where can people find you and your books online?
Tom: I’m on Amazon. My spy thrillers are T.D. Donnelly. You can find me at TDDonnelly.com. All my stuff will be at TDDonnelly.com.
If you’re looking specifically for Superdraft, because we have to separate our audiences, blah, blah, blah, Thomas Dean Donnelly is my full screenwriting name. Thomas Dean Donnelly is where you can find Superdraft on Amazon.
Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Tom. That was great.
Tom: I always have a great time talking to you, Jo. Thank you so much.