Authoring & Playwriting

Trusted feedback may be one of the most underrated tools in screenwriting and authoring. The right note can save a scene, deepen a character, tighten the pacing, or help us realize we’ve been lovingly protecting a paragraph, joke, or scene that needs to go sit quietly in the deleted file.

But not all feedback is equal. Some people help us hear the story more clearly. Others try to turn it into the story they would write.

For me, the best feedback respects the writer’s voice while helping the work become stronger, clearer, and more emotionally honest.

How do you know when feedback is worth taking, and when do you trust your own instincts instead?

### Subtitle: When the Hybrid Advantages of Civilizations Are Rewritten as Pure-Blood Hero Legends

What is the biggest difference between history and film or television?

Many people would say:

History is real.

Film and television are fictional.

But the true difference is not there.

The real difference is this:

> History records outcomes.

>

> Film and television provide explanations.

---

And that is precisely where the problem begins.

When people try to explain why an empire rose, why a civilization flourished, or why a nation succeeded, complexity is often deliberately removed.

The story eventually becomes:

* A king of extraordinary talent.

* A hardworking and courageous people.

* Exceptionally wise ancestors.

* A hero who emerged from nowhere.

As if all historical momentum came from some innate superiority carried in the blood.

---

But when you open the history books, a completely different picture emerges.

Almost every civilization that truly rose to prominence existed in a state of mixture.

* Mixed populations.

* Mixed ideas.

* Mixed technologies.

* Mixed institutions.

Even the ruling classes themselves were often hybrid in origin.

---

This was true of the Mongol Empire.

It was true of England.

It was true of the Ottoman Empire.

And it was equally true of the United States.

The defining feature of these civilizations during their rise was never purity.

It was diversity.

---

Temüjin did not descend from the sky as a superhuman of the steppe.

Nor was the Mongol Empire a miracle created solely by a single pure-blood people.

During its expansion:

* Chinese artisans entered the imperial system.

* Persian financial administrators participated in governance.

* Arab merchants connected trade networks.

* Turkic military groups managed frontier regions.

The empire functioned more like a vast furnace continuously absorbing capabilities from outside itself.

---

England tells a similar story.

Viewed backward through the lens of modern national narratives, one can easily develop the illusion that England was always the England of the English.

In reality, Normans, Vikings, Angles, and Saxons mixed with one another for centuries.

Laws, languages, religions, and military institutions were repeatedly reorganized.

Modern England was, in many respects, the product of that mixture.

---

What is truly interesting is this:

The successful actors in history are often hybrids.

The successful actors in film and television increasingly resemble pure-blood beings.

---

This transformation is not accidental.

Complex history is difficult to turn into a story.

Bloodline myths are easy.

---

An empire shaped by dozens of peoples, hundreds of institutional experiments, and thousands of competing interest groups is difficult to explain in a two-hour film.

But if the story becomes:

> A great people gave birth to a great hero.

Everyone immediately understands.

---

Thus complex history is compressed into identity mythology.

Civilizational advantages become bloodline advantages.

Institutional advantages become cultural advantages.

Technological accumulation becomes ethnic destiny.

---

The problem is that myths can provide identity.

But they cannot provide a path to replication.

---

If a nation succeeded because its ancestors were great,

then all descendants can do is continue praising their ancestors.

If an empire became powerful because its bloodline was superior,

then all future generations can do is continue emphasizing bloodline purity.

Such stories sound inspiring.

But they fail to answer the most practical question of all:

> Why were they successful in the first place?

---

The truly harsh lesson of history is this:

Success often comes from absorption.

Failure often comes from exclusion.

---

One of the most famous examples of the twentieth century was the flight of talent.

When certain societies began redefining membership through identity, bloodline, or ideology, large numbers of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs began to leave.

Among them was Einstein.

---

The most important question here is not:

How brilliant was Einstein?

The more important question is:

> Why did Einstein leave?

---

When a society becomes increasingly obsessed with determining who is a legitimate member,

it often gradually stops discussing who can create value.

Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that the ultimate competition between civilizations is not a contest of identity purity.

It is a contest of absorptive capacity.

---

A truly powerful civilization resembles a port.

It continually welcomes:

* New technologies.

* New ideas.

* New institutions.

* New talent.

Rather than constantly inspecting whether bloodlines are sufficiently pure.

---

The irony is that most empires in history rose through mixture.

Yet in later films and television dramas, they are often rewritten as pure-blood myths.

As though civilizations rise because of innate gifts,

rather than through the continuous absorption of the outside world.

---

Perhaps this is precisely why bloodline myths have become increasingly popular in modern storytelling.

Myths are easy to understand.

Reality is far more complicated.

But for anyone who genuinely wishes to understand history, the most important question is never:

> Who were they?

It is:

> Why were they able to continually absorb things that did not originally belong to them?

### Subtitle: When All Knowledge Becomes Free, Discovery Starts Charging the Price

The internet age left behind a widely repeated myth:

> Information wants to be free.

As a result, many people naturally concluded:

Open source means cheap.

Free means easy to obtain.

The reality is exactly the opposite.

Very often, open source is the most expensive thing of all.

---

In the past, people understood cost as purchase cost.

A book cost thirty dollars.

A course cost three hundred dollars.

A consulting session cost three thousand dollars.

Naturally, people assumed:

The higher the price, the greater the value.

But that way of thinking belonged to the era of content scarcity.

In a scarcity era, the most expensive thing was production.

Today, we no longer live in that era.

---

Today's problem is not that nobody is producing content.

The problem is that too much content is being produced.

Every day, videos, articles, papers, blogs, code repositories, and research reports are uploaded in quantities far beyond what any individual could read in an entire lifetime.

The nature of the problem has changed.

The truly expensive thing is no longer the content itself.

It is discovering the content.

---

A five-hundred-dollar course is easy to find.

Because someone is buying advertisements.

Someone is purchasing traffic.

Someone is designing conversion funnels.

Someone is competing for your attention on its behalf.

But a genuinely valuable open-source project may be quietly sitting in some forgotten corner of the internet.

No advertisements.

No marketing team.

No celebrity endorsements.

No media interviews.

Sometimes the creator cannot even be bothered to promote it.

It is completely free.

Yet almost nobody knows it exists.

---

Platforms are not designed to find the most valuable information.

Platforms are designed to find the most shareable information.

The two are not the same thing.

Outrage spreads more easily than rigor.

Positions spread more easily than thought.

Emotion spreads more easily than facts.

As a result, vast amounts of genuinely valuable open-source knowledge sink beneath the surface.

---

Many people assume:

Open source means everyone can access it.

In reality, it only means everyone is allowed to access it.

Those are two very different things.

Libraries were never locked.

Yet most books remain unread.

The internet has never prohibited people from learning.

Yet most knowledge remains undiscovered.

---

And so a strange era has emerged.

The most expensive thing is no longer knowledge.

It is the ability to find knowledge.

Not copyright.

But discovery.

Not ownership.

But recognition.

---

More and more people are realizing that what they truly need is not more information.

What they need is a navigation system capable of guiding them through an ocean of information.

Something that can read what they do not have time to read.

Find connections they cannot see.

Discover things they would never think to search for.

Recover open-source assets that have sunk to the bottom of the sea.

---

The greatest divide of the future may not come from wealth.

Nor from formal education.

Perhaps not even from intelligence.

It may come from a far simpler question:

When all knowledge is openly laid before you,

do you possess the ability to find it?

---

In the age of copyright, the most expensive thing was production.

In the age of traffic, the most expensive thing was exposure.

In the age of AI, the most expensive thing is becoming discovery.

Perhaps that is why open source is the most expensive thing of all.

It never charges a fee.

But it requires you to find it first.

I'm a writer who is not a writer.  Honestly, I've never earned a penny from writing (except for resumes for other people, which sometimes had fees up to $50K, but it's not the same thing!).  I've read everything written by Fyodor Dostoeyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Anthony Burgess, Wittgenstein, Plato, Proust's "Past Recaptured", and all the sci-fi (nearly) of Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke and Heinlein. Modern writers I most enjoy include Thomas Pynchon, who is apparently a 6th cousin once removed of mine, via at least 6 or 7 different lines, but of course I've never met him. My style is a bit minimalist, and I have only one screenplay ("Frozen Stones"), which is a dramedy about small-town Curling, inspired by the massive over-coverage during the recent Olympics.  Most of my written work is in the form of articles about Logic, Physics, Warp Drives, Time-machines (I have collaborated with a world-leading physicist on a paper, recently), and Information Theory. I have invented multiple new time-machine models and had the opportunity to discuss them with one or two of the world's leading physicists working on that subject.  My screenplay is partly based on Wittgenstein's "Private Language Argument"... Wittgenstein once wrote "A serious work of philosophy could be written consisting entirely of jokes"... and also contains some not-so-subtle hints about the warp drive I invented. -- a 'hybrid' of my torsion-based model and two other highly peer-reviewed solutions, using only "positive' energy (i.e. plasma). My warp drive idea is a hybrid, also because I grew up influenced heavily by being a 2nd cousin of a famous Nobel-winner scientist who invented hybrid 4x yield wheat, immortalized fictionally as well in Star Trek's "Trouble with Tribbles" as quadro-triticale. My oldest early friends were sons of Gene Roddenberry's attorney and Stanley Kubrick's attorney... So "warp" was in my destiny. In Kindergarten, 1965, in Woodland Hills, I described my dreams of 'alien abduction' to my friend and his response was "We're making a show about it." lol! By the way, I am NOT "Nicholas Meyer", the author of multiple "Star Trek" movies, but I have corresponded with him, and we both had fathers who were concert-level pianists.  

I have compiled a 200 page text based on my 37 years of experience as a recruiter and CEO in the Executive and Technical Search industry.  I'm wondering if there are other persons here who also have a long background in Headhunting, and possibly mathematics, as well who would be interested in discussing the book, possibly refining it, etc.  It's quite technical, but has human interest stories and is designed to be read by CEOs, candidates and HR -- anyone involved in the 'hiring loop' who wants to gain a technical mastery of the topic matter. Here is a recent article about the book, from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/axiomatic-headhunting-why-your-next-hire-...

Hi everyone!

I’m an author from Hungary, and I’ve recently entered the Stage 32 community. I have a completed high-concept dystopian novel titled "2084" (available in English).

The story is a near-future thriller exploring AI surveillance and the ethical boundaries of technology. While the book has its roots in Europe, I believe the themes are universal and highly relevant to the US market and global film/TV adaptation.

I’m curious to hear from fellow authors here:

1. What was your experience in finding a US-based literary agent for genre fiction?

2. Are there specific platforms or communities you recommend for authors looking to bridge the gap between Europe and the US?

I’m also developing a 3-page treatment for a screen adaptation, so I’m happy to connect with anyone interested in sci-fi world-building or IP development!

Looking forward to your insights!

Best, Árpád Váczi

Hey Authors and Playwrights,

I'm not in a miserable mood. I'm talking about 'Misery' by Stephen King, where the bulk of the story takes place in a single guest bedroom, where an injured author is held captive by his number one fan.

I'm bringing this up because RB wrote a blog about contained films - this got me thinking of contained novels! 'Misery' would be my favourite - what's yours?

Check out the latest blog and drop RB a comment too:

https://www.stage32.com/blog/coffee-content-the-quiet-power-of-the-conta...

Where do you do your best writing?

Silence?

Coffee shops?

Late at night?

Early mornings?

Rainstorms?

Complete chaos somehow working in your favor?

I always find it fascinating how differently creativity shows up for different people. Some writers thrive with structure and routine, while others seem to do their best work in unpredictable bursts of inspiration.

Personally, some of my most creative moments have happened very early in the morning, when the world still felt quiet.

What about you?

Where do you feel the most creatively alive when you write?

How do you keep yourself motivated, even when you're not up to creating?

If you're anything like me, sometimes life will LIFE really hard. And when that happens, writing can fall through the cracks.

Before you know it, your timeline is obliterated and the guilt is real.

For me, there are two things that I do when this happens, depending on what the situation is:

1. Keep the routine.

Maybe it's my Taurus in four houses, but I'm a creature of habit. If I can stick to my routine, the words will come and the projects will get finished.

If I don't, timelines slip and before I know it, the project I thought would take two months has taken two years.

But this only works if there's nothing traumatic going on.

2. Intentionally go into artist hibernation.

Sometimes as a writer, it's important to rest.

If your mind is constantly taxed, then your creativity will be zapped (it might take a while for this to happen but creative burnout is real).

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your work is to let it breathe and pick it back up when you have the mental and emotional bandwidth to focus on it.

This one is harder for me because when I'm not writing, I feel like I'm doing something wrong.

So if you struggle with this too, remember, it's not lazy to take a break. Sometimes, it's exactly what your work needs.

How do you keep yourself in the space to write (or not)?

https://storyventures.substack.com/p/seven-naughty-words-every-storyteller

Hello everyone,

I have a few questions for those who have successfully pitched novels, books, or original IP to producers, managers, or other industry professionals.

1. Do executives usually expect a screenplay, or can a treatment, pitch deck, or published novel be enough?

2. How do writers choose the right executive to pitch when they have a novel rather than a screenplay?

3. Have any writers successfully secured representation, option agreements, or production interest based primarily on a novel or other original IP?

4. If a two-page pitch clearly states that the project is a completed novel and that the writer is seeking a producer and screenwriter to develop the adaptation, how should one interpret a subsequent request for a screenplay? If no screenplay exists, is it appropriate to provide the novel, treatment, or pitch deck instead?

I would greatly appreciate hearing about your experiences and any advice you may have.

Thank you!

Hey Authors and Playwrights,

Remember a little while ago I asked where you all found unexpected success? I've used the first half of the responses and put them in a blog.

Check it out:

https://www.stage32.com/blog/the-unexpected-road-to-success-stories-from...

I've saved the other responses for the next blog piece. Thank you everyone for contributing - it's a great read! ...if I do say so myself :)