A Quote by Jojo Moyes

My Writers Guild of America card is one of my proudest possessions. I was given it after being invited to write the script for a film of my last novel, 'Me Before You,' which is being made by MGM. Whenever I look at it, I think, 'I'm a Hollywood writer!'
It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.
In the case of my second film The Fish Child (El Niño Pez), I had written the novel about 5 years before I made into a film. In the case of The German Doctor I had published the novel a year before I started writing the script, I even had another project to shoot. But I had this idea of the powerful cinematic language from the novel that I couldn't let go of.
There was no studio involved when we made 'Stargate.' It was financed through Le Studio Canal+ in France and, after the film was finished, it was sold to MGM. When the film was a success, MGM decided to do a television series based on the movie.
Before you approach a production entity or even a potential producer, you should write up a treatment and register your show with the Writers Guild of America.
Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.
It never occurred to me to be a film director, partly because I hadn't seen a single film by a female director, but I liked the idea of being a writer moving to Hollywood and being unhappy; that sounded romantic and fabulous to me.
I'm really sort of cautious about being too didactic. To me there are writers that can do that, but I think they drown in that after a while. I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.
One of my favorite pieces of advice about being a writer came from a very formative teacher I had as an undergraduate, named John Hersey. On our last day of class together, which was also John Hersey last day before retirement, he said, "Remember, the world doesn't need any new writers." Which at first didn't seem like great advice, but when you unpacked it, it was really that it's not enough to be confident in what you do; be conscious of bringing something to the world of readers and writers that it hasn't seen before. Something idiosyncratic.
Before, I was writing a script to make a movie. At a certain point, I became A Writer in Film and Television. So I got TV deals to write stuff, film deals to write stuff. But it's dangerous. I got into the WGA, and I became kind of, you know, a slave! They just pay you to write a script, and it's hard to make the movies.
I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada.
I very comprehensively studied Irving Thalberg and his biographies. He's who [Scott] Fitzgerald roughly modeled the character after. He worked for him, as a writer, when he was at MGM. And, of course, I revisited the novel and the politics of MGM and the studio system at the time and familiarized myself with the world. There was a great deal of physical and literary work that went into it.
When you're a big enough part of the process that the Writers Guild gives you a lot of credit, that's a good thing. It tells me that I've had a significant impact on the film as a writer.
As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I'm from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.
At MGM there was a script cage in the basement where they’d show rushes. And I thought to myself, “How do I get into the script cage and find out what my future is?” I climbed into the script cage one night and spent the whole night in there. I saw the bowels of MGM. I saw the studio scripts that the producers had seen; the writers had just handed them in. And I started thinking this is a chance to pick my own roles.
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