Alex Stabler

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 23:
We're all on a learning curve. Every writer, at whatever stage of their career - is on a learning curve. The minute you forget that - either to shit on a less experienced writer, or to refuse to be edited, or to ignore criticism - is the moment you start to suck.

I genuinely have never understood seeing fellow writers as competition. They’re colleagues and friends; they get the struggle. Players or readers generally like more than one writer, so we can help each other get discovered :)

This writing doesn't affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 18181999:
"Write what you know" is limiting advice, which leads to limited writing. Instead, know what you're writing about. That means due diligence: good research, wide reading, specialist help and advice if you need it. Stay curious. Try new ideas. No limits.

Honestly, you can do pretty much whatever you want in screenwriting if it's with intention.

Format, structure, tone. Whatever.

But the clarity of that intent is key. If you lose that, you lose the reader.

#screenwriting

🎬 The arts aren’t a luxury - they’re an export.

At #Lab25, @aiannucci.bsky.social reminds us that the UK’s Creative Industries make up 6% of our economy and 7% of our workforce - the GDP equivalent of oil + car industries combined.

🎥 Watch more clips from the Creative UK Pavilion hubs.ly/Q03QVhV90

I cannot recommend you enough to install the Wikipedia app on your devices and use it like you would any search engine. Nowadays they even have tabs so you can open many articles at once.

And, if you can, please donate to the foundation. It has survived the internet enshittification that way.

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 154:
Feed your writing daily. Feed it with fiction, non-fiction, news, games, theatre, films, art. Feed it with conversation. Feed it with experience. Feed it with curiosity. Don't expect to get anything out unless you also keep putting in.

Engage in the *process* of writing, building, creating. It's the fun part, it's the part where you're making choices! You are actively participating in the word by word, brush by brush, piece by piece creation of a thing.

feels like yet again time to mention that the *videogames* industry (that's a creative industry, which people do creative degrees in) brings in more than twice the amount to the British economy as the fishing and steel industries *combined*

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

Dad’s books are full of empathy, common sense, and a healthy suspicion of the powerful. But at its heart his work is also about how systems keep people poor while pretending it’s their own fault. So I hope Kemi’s taking notes as well as reading the jokes.

Writing science fiction is a strange business. One part of me is trying work out a satisfying obstacle for the characters to overcome, while another part is researching helium mining.

I suspect you WILL.
Even if you affect a handful of people, it will have been worth it. I tell my RPG DMs this all the time. (Some of our/their best work is seen by 5-9 people, never anyone else, lol.)
All of us who loved working on #Dishonored are eternally thankful for that passionate response.

This performance - and the Dishonored DLC campaign he starred in, a majestic redemption story which more people should play - has stuck with me for a decade. When Madsen read Daud’s lines, they came out smoked.

OK, so here’s my JJ Abrams story…

Before I started working in digital restoration one of my primary jobs in post-production support was running the in-house theater and screening rooms at work. Every now and again it would get booked for casting sessions, because it was perfectly suited for that…

My screenwriting tutor had us practice writing dialogue-heavy scenes as conflicts: each character wants something different, and one of them wins.

Something I took from this is that sometimes, exposition works best as an argument. Instead of “as you know”, characters have a stake in their world.

What boggles me the most about people using LLMs to brainstorm or write stories is that they're skipping the fun part of the process. That's the good stuff! I see something amazing in my mind that's unlike anything anyone else sees & I craft it using words my unique lived experience has taught me

Remind me again why we need AI to write novels, create paintings, compose music and voice audiobooks?

Oh yeah. Because it enables billionaires - friends of Nick Clegg - to become even richer by not employing any writers, artists, musicians or performers. Will the consumer benefit? Never.

There are people who want/need to write and there are people who just want to call themselves writers. The one thing genAI *has* done is made that difference extremely clear.

For anyone who ever moaned "The writers were just making it up as they went along!" about a TV show...

Please read THIS.

I once lost my uni accommodation keycard and found it months later in a deck of cards