By The Writers Store - The Writers Strike has officially ended... The business of show business will once again run full steam ahead! The spec script market is anticipating another mid 90's-style boom... Whether you're a guild member or you're just starting out as a writer, this is a sizzling new era to take control of your career, and capitalize on the renewed creative energy coursing through Hollywood.

By Patrick Goldstein, Los Angeles Times - "Hollywood is a town awash in hyphenates. TV is loaded with writer-producers. The movie biz is full of writer-directors. There's even a legion of actor-filmmakers like Clint Eastwood and George Clooney. But as the writers strike enters its third week, I think the future belongs to a tantalizing new hyphenate: the writer-entrepreneur."

Born in the US to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan failed her mother’s expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She settled on writing fiction. Her novels are The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning, all New York Times bestsellers and the recipient of various awards.

The character development work "doing archetypes" is the foundation for discovering and writing your own already-existing characters.

By Cat Robson -- Dorothy Parker once excused herself for missing a deadline by telling her editor "Someone else was using the pencil." I see that pencil, Dotty, and raise you a set of Berol Prismacolor pencils missing flesh tone, a floaty pen with hula dancer and palm trees that says "Our Honeymoon, December 5, 1941," a rubber stamp alphabet, a Waterman pen that I dropped in a daiquiri that doesn't work, and a tiny red pencil from a bowling alley, all inexplicably in use.

By Writers Store Staff -- The third edition of Syd Field's preeminent book on screenwriting, Screenplay, provides easily understood guidelines for writing a screenplay, from concept to finished product.

Steven Prigge, a one-time assistant on the hit sitcom Spin City starring Michael J. Fox, has written a new book entitled Created By: Inside the Minds of TV’s Top Show Creators. [Interview by Writers Store Staff.]

By Dara Marks -- Growth is the by-product of a cycle that occurs in nature... In the cycles of our own lives, these near-death moments are rich with heightened dramatic possibilities that the writer wants to capitalize upon.

It appears that funding follows talent in the domain -- and test scores don't really matter in adulthood -- performance does. What happens to "former gifted children" when they grow up is they show their talents and gifts in a domain.

Writing is surely an art, a spiritual journey, an emotional odyssey, but how is it a science? I asked myself that question a few years ago when a friend who taught in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program asked me to give a guest lecture.