Amy Suto

Back in the day, I wrote a guide for men on how to write female characters.In a nutshell: like human beings. Complex, flawed, whole. Strong -- but also weak. A spectrum, just like male characters have been written about for decades in film and television.

In the past, I've written about how to balance writing while being a showrunners' assistant or writers' assistant, but today I'd like to tackle general strategies for stress relief so that you can maintain your creativity in any period of your life -- during the holidays, in times of financial stress, or while anxiously waiting the return of FX's LEGION.

I'm a sassy writer who gets no sleep and cooks more often than your grandmother. So here's a recipe for creating great characters in six steps!

Hey guys! It's 2013, and now that the holidays are over, it's time to get to work on that screenplay you've been wanting to write. Today is a fresh start, where we can put procrastination and overcaffeination behind us, and become more productive, creative people who make up fictional relationships and events alone in front of a laptop (or typewriter, if you're classy like that.)

Working screenwriters tend to have several screenplays in the pipeline at once, all at different levels of completion. This way, they can bounce around between all the stages of the writing process without getting fatigued, and always have an answer for the dreaded question, 'what else do you got?' But balancing a pipeline of different projects -- and actually completing them -- takes time. When you start off, chances are you'll just focus on one screenplay at a time. And sometimes, it's easy to forget about the messiness that is the rough draft.

So "caffeine dependency" didn't make this list, but it's an important part of my creative process. Caffeine's great for productivity! Especially in latte form! Or any form, really!

In the novel writing community, word sprints and word wars are common practice, especially during National Novel Writing Month month of November. On forums and Twitter, novelists set word count goals and race other writers to that goal. One word war I participated in had a goal of 7,000 words within 24 hours.

I'm an action/thriller writer with an emphasis on the spy and assassin subgenres, so most of my scripts have guns. Scratch that: ALL of my scripts have guns. That's why my research brought me to the largest indoor gun range in the country, where I got to learn all about firearms from one of the experts in the industry.