The First Time I Got Paid to Write
My first screenwriting gig, a skateboarding chimpanzee, and a hospital cancer ward.
Sometimes there are these hinge moments in life, infrequent but dizzying in their intensity, when change is less like a dripping faucet and more like a tsunami, a flood, a tornado that turns your world upside-down and drops you in a whole other version of your life. The result may be good or bad or somewhere in between, but what marks this sort of change, the kind that feels like a natural disaster, is that it’s permanent. Wherever you end up, you can’t go back again.
MVP: Most Valuable PrimateAir BudMVP
start
can’t
Pulp FictionPulp Fiction
Pulp FictionWar and Peace
Air Bud
Sullivan’s Travels
Home Improvement
MVP2: Most Vertical Primate
honestare
Elan was born in Vancouver and lives in Toronto. He is the award-winning screenwriter of five movies, most recently What If, a romantic comedy starring Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, and Adam Driver. His first novel, All Our Wrong Days, was published by Dutton Books (Penguin Random House) and is being translated into more than two dozen languages.
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More in this series
Standing on the Galata Bridge
“If I could write a eulogy for him, convey his value in a single page of prose, then how could I justify wasting 80,000 words on invented characters whom I felt nothing for?”
Beyond the Realm of Prosody: The year I spent writing sonnets
How I wrote a failed sonnet that turned into my fourth novel.