The Write Process

UCLA Extension Writers' Program
  • 4.8 (23)
  • EDUCATION
  • UPDATED SEMIMONTHLY
The Write Process

All writing is a tightrope walk from where the idea originates to the moment a book, movie, or TV episode emerges in the world. In The Write Process, Charles Jensen, director of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, asks writing instructors and students who’ve walked the tightrope and come out the other side to talk about their process. Each episode tells the story of how one writer took one project from concept to completion, showcasing the various—and varied—paths we take when we follow one good idea all the way home.

  1. Teresa Yang on Nothing But the Tooth: An Insider’s Guide to Dental Health

    NOV 8

    Teresa Yang on Nothing But the Tooth: An Insider’s Guide to Dental Health

    Teresa Yang, DDS is the author of the award-winning book, Nothing But The Tooth: An Insider’s Guide to Dental Health. She has practiced dentistry for over 30 years. Yang has taught clinical dentistry and patient management at UCLA School of Dentistry, where she is a member of the Board of Counselors. She is also a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board and has written extensively on dental topics. Dr. Yang lives in Los Angeles, California. Have you ever visited a new dentist and been told you need a “smile makeover,” with the implication that if your teeth were whiter and straighter, you would be more successful and happier? Or maybe you’ve never had a cavity – and now, you have a half dozen that require immediate attention. Root canal, crown, or implant: which procedure is best for your situation? NOTHING BUT THE TOOTH is a ready guide to dental health. It begins with the most important question: how to choose a competent and ethical dentist – and ends with a discussion about technological advances in the dental field. Let this book help you communicate better with your dentist.

    34 min
  2. Mylo Lam on And Not / And Yet

    OCT 24

    Mylo Lam on And Not / And Yet

    Mylo Lam was born in Vietnam and lives in Los Angeles. He and his family are refugees from Cambodia. Mylo’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Margins, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. His multimedia work won Palette Poetry’s Brush & Lyre Prize, his poetry won Blood Orange Review's Emerging Writers Contest, and his chapbook AND NOT/AND YET was published by Quarterly West. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at Randolph College. And Not / And Yet comprises a series of poems exploring death, foreignness, ancestry, and form through the lens of Buddhist scripture, specifically texts that detail a person's harrowing journey as they transition away from the realm of the living.

    29 min
  3. Michael Jann on Bug Therapy

    OCT 11

    Michael Jann on Bug Therapy

    Michael Jann is an Emmy-nominated late-night comedy writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon for over two decades. Michael teaches screenwriting at UCLA-Extension. He co-wrote and co-produced the short animated film Bug Therapy (www.bugtherapy.film). It’s a story about a mosquito who faints at the sight of blood. This story is deeply personal: Mike’s son suffered a severe mental-breakdown at age 29, resulting in hospitalizations and psych wards. His ongoing recovery (fingers crossed) has fueled Mike’s passion to fight the stigma of mental illness. Mike lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and writing partner Michele Jourdan. Michele’s the funny one; Mike's the pretty one. In Bug Therapy, Citronella, a mosquito who faints at the sight of blood, nervously waits outside her first group therapy session, while the Pill Bug therapist, Dr. Pill tries to calm a neurotic group of bugs, each suffering from a mental-health issue: An OCD germaphobic Fly freaks when he runs out of hand sanitizer. A Dragonfly couple struggle with co-dependency; she's literally on top of him. A Grasshopper, addicted to coffee, is so jumpy, he launches himself in mid-sentence. A Praying Mantis who doesn't pray because she thinks she is God. A terrified Spider is deathly afraid of -- spiders. And, a perfectly-camouflaged Stick Bug complains that no one ever "sees" him. Throughout all this, Citronella battles her urge to flee - while Dr. Pill implores her to share her "embarrassing" problem.

    35 min
  4. Hillary Yablon on Sylvia’s Second Act

    SEP 27

    Hillary Yablon on Sylvia’s Second Act

    Hillary Yablon lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young sons. She is a graduate of Princeton University and earned her MA in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. This, her debut novel, received the Allegra Johnson Prize at UCLA. In Sylvia’s Second Act, Sylvia’s husband’s cheating on her. She hates Boca. Sylvia is mad and she isn’t going to take it anymore. She’s moving back to the city of her dreams—with her best friend, Evie, in tow. When sixty-three-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with the floozy of their retirement community, she’s shocked and furious...at first. Sylvia realizes that actually, this isn’t what she wants anymore. So she enlists her best friend, the glamorous older widow Evie, to join her in setting up a new life in Manhattan. Sylvia doesn't want to be twenty-five again. Her age gives her wisdom, experience, and perspective. A career, sex, fun, and a new romance—her entire second act is stretched out in front of her.

    47 min
  5. Shawna Kenney on I Was a Teenage Dominatrix

    SEP 20

    Shawna Kenney on I Was a Teenage Dominatrix

    I Was a Teenage Dominatrix is the true story of one woman’s quest for self-education, in academia and beyond. Kenney wrote a sex work memoir before the term ‘sex work’ was commonplace, unwittingly becoming part of what the New York Times dubbed the ‘sex work literati’ of the early 2000s. Shawna is the author of four books, including the award-winning memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, and most recently, Live at the Safari Club: A History of HarDCore Punk in the Nation’s Capital 1988-1998 (Rare Bird Books) Her arts journalism and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, Ms., Pitchfork, Vice, Bust and more. She serves as a Contributing Editor with Narratively Magazine and leads international writing retreat Hamlet's Hideaway in Denmark every summer.

    34 min
  6. Jarrod Shusterman and Sofia Lapuente on Retro

    AUG 29

    Jarrod Shusterman and Sofia Lapuente on Retro

    Jarrod Shusterman is the New York Times and international bestselling author of Dry, Roxy and Retro. His collaboration in Gleanings, the fourth installment of the bestselling Scythe trilogy, is being adapted for the screen by Universal. He writes for the screen and teaches courses at UCLA in creative writing. Sofía Lapuente is an author, screenwriter, professor at UCLA, and avid world traveler who immigrated from Spain to the United States to realize her dream of storytelling. Jarrod and Sofía have a passion for collaborative storytelling across many mediums, with love and multiculturalism as an ethos, and enjoy traveling the world and learning new languages. Since then, she has worked as a producer and casting director on an Emmy nominated show. They've received starred reviews, from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Blooklist and more! In the novel Retro, Things were never supposed to get this out of hand. When Luna receives an opportunity to win a scholarship to the college of her dreams, she’s all in. It’s called the Retro Challenge, where contestants live without modern technology. At first, the challenge is fun. But then things get dangerous. Kids start disappearing, including Luna’s friends. There are voices in the woods. Markings on the trees. Secrets. Lies. Betrayal. The weight of her family on her shoulders. There’s so much on the line for Luna, and she’s falling in love with the last guy she expected. Unless she can figure out the truth behind who’s sabotaging the challenge, the next person to disappear may be Luna herself.

    43 min
  7. Mary-Alice Daniel on Mass for Shut-Ins

    JAN 5

    Mary-Alice Daniel on Mass for Shut-Ins

    Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border and raised in England and Tennessee. A cross-genre writer, she has published work in New England Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, and several journals and anthologies. Mass for Shut-Ins, her first book of poetry, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was released in March 2023. Selecting her manuscript, Rae Armantrout called it “Flowers of Evil for the 21st century.” Daniel’s transcontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco/HarperCollins 2022), was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Review’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. An alumna of Yale University and the University of Michigan’s Writers’ MFA, she turns to her third and fourth books, supported by fellowships from Brown University and Cave Canem. Holding a PhD from USC, she is recalled to California for the third time as the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College. In the 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Mary-Alice Daniel confronts culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds. African and Western mythic systems and modern rituals animate an ill-omened universe. Here, it is always night, grim night, under absurd moons. Venturing through dreamscapes, hellscapes, and lurid landscapes, the poems stray inside speculative fields of spiritual warfare. This collection is controlled chaos powered by nightmare fuel. It engineers an utterly odd organism: a cosmology cobbled with scripture, superstition, mass media, mad science. Horrid, holy, unholy—these pages overrun with the unhinged, intrusive thoughts that obsess us all late into nighttime.

    50 min
  8. Jeff Bonnett on Falling for Christmas

    12/22/2023

    Jeff Bonnett on Falling for Christmas

    Jeff Bonnett is a writer/filmmaker who began his career in Hollywood as a script reader. From there, his first pitch and subsequent screenplay became a film released on the Hallmark channel in 2015, titled “Love by the Book”. His latest screenplay, “Falling for Christmas” was released on Netflix last November, where it premiered at #1, was in Netflix’s Top Ten movie list in 92 countries, and was the top U.S. streaming movie across all platforms in its second week running. Before the holiday season ended, it had been viewed over 78 million times globally. Dubbed by IndieWire as “the Citizen Kane of Netflix Christmas movies”, Falling for Christmas is about a newly engaged, spoiled hotel heiress who suffers from amnesia after a skiing accident, and finds herself in the care of a down-on-his-luck widower and his daughter at their quaint ski lodge in the days leading up to Christmas.

    55 min
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4.8
out of 5
23 Ratings

About

All writing is a tightrope walk from where the idea originates to the moment a book, movie, or TV episode emerges in the world. In The Write Process, Charles Jensen, director of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, asks writing instructors and students who’ve walked the tightrope and come out the other side to talk about their process. Each episode tells the story of how one writer took one project from concept to completion, showcasing the various—and varied—paths we take when we follow one good idea all the way home.

Information

  • Creator
    UCLA Extension Writers' Program
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2024
  • Episodes
    72
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    The Write Process

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