How I Write
The How I Write Series
Host Hilton Obenzinger brings faculty and advanced writers from across the disciplines to explore the nuts and bolts, pleasures and pains, of all types of writing.
In conversation with his distinguished guests, Hilton examine writers' habits, idiosyncrasies, techniques, trade secrets, hidden anxieties, and delights.
We will discuss how a writer generates ideas, sustains large-scale projects, combines research with composition, overcomes various impediments and blocks, and cultivates stylistic innovations.
Writing communities share experiences (even bad ones), so that all writers can learn and grow; Stanford is an exceptionally rich community for gaining such insights.
Next Event
How I Write for Film and Television with Bill Guttentag
Lecturer, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Thursday, February 9, 2012
7:30 p.m.
Geology Corner (Bldg. 320), Room 105
FREE and open to the public
Bill Guttentag is a two-time Oscar-winning documentary and feature film writer-producer-director. He also wrote and directed Nanking, a theatrical documentary that premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and features Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, and Jürgen Prochnow. In 2008 he wrote and directed Live!, a dramatic feature starring Eva Mendes and Andre Braugher. Soundtrack for a Revolution had its international premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. He is currently in post-production on Knife Fight, a film he wrote and directed about a Democratic political consultant, starring Rob Lowe, Jamie Chung, Julie Bowen, Carrie-Ann Moss, Eric McCormack, Jennifer Morrison, and Saffron Burrows, will be released in 2012.
In 2003 Bill Guttentag won an Oscar for the documentary Twin Towers. He has also has received a second Oscar, three additional Oscar nominations, a Peabody Award, three Emmy Awards, two additional Emmy nominations, two Writers Guild Award nominations, a Producers Guild Award nomination, and a Robert Kennedy Journalism Award. His films have been selected for the Sundance Film Festival three times and have played and won awards at numerous American and international film festivals. They have also received a number of special screenings internationally and in the US, including at the White House.
His first novel, Boulevard, was published in 2010 and the paperback version was released in 2011.
He is a lecturer at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, teaching a class on the film and television business.
Photo by Marina Brodskaya
Read more about this event at Stanford Continuing Studies.
Archive
Stanford on iTunes
More than two dozen How I Write conversations are now available via Stanford on iTunes. See and hear guests from bass guitar star Victor Wooten to chemist Richard Zare, from acclaimed essayist Rebecca Solnit to theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind.
Selected Transcripts
Transcripts are available for selected How I Write conversations.
All "How I Write" Authors
A complete list of How I Write guests from 2002 to the present.
Press
"How I Write" has been featured in The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford:
Each quarter Obenzinger invites someone who writes, including all types of experienced writers in all sorts of genres and forms, to share their writing style, habits, pleasures and pains with an audience. Over the years, Obenzinger has heard it all, from a scientist who quotes Shakespeare in research articles to a novelist who only writes while wearing her favorite cowboy hat. As peculiar as some of these quirks may sound, Obenzinger has discovered that there are all kinds of ways to write, and he shares this mantra with the undergraduates who turn to him for assistance when tackling, what for many is their first long-form writing project, their honors theses. In addition to fiction writers, writers from a wide range of fields, including political science, engineering, poetry and human biology have taken part in “How I Write” events. Past guests have included Stanford President John Hennessey, English professor and director of American Studies Shelley Fisher Fishkin and political science professor Terry Karl. Other speakers have included scientists such as Richard Zare and computer scientist Eric Roberts.
Read more at The Human Experience.
For more information about Writing Center events, please contact HWC Administrative Coordinator Vania Sciolini (vsvania@stanford.edu).
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