The Writing Process

Screenwriting Yoda Shares his Wisdom

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Screenwriting Professor Richard Walter
Screenwriting Professor Richard Walter

It’s easier to win admission to the Harvard Medical School than a seat in Professor Walter’s legendary screenwriting seminars at UCLA

Richard Walter was my screenwriting professor at UCLA…and, in large part thanks to what I learned from him, I’ve had a long and successful career as a TV writer/producer and screenwriter. His former students have taken Hollywood by storm…just in the last four years, graduates of his seminars have won three Oscars and five Oscar nominations and have written ten movies for Steven Spielberg. Now, for the first time, he’s opening his acclaimed class to non-UCLA students for a special session June 24-Aug 2nd. Enrollment is limited…so sign up fast.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to corner Richard and get some of his insights into the bevy of “screenwriting gurus” out there, the state of movie & TV biz, and how the craft of screenwriting has changed in the last few years.

LEE: What can aspiring writers get from your class that they can’t get from the myriad of script gurus teaching courses out there?

RICHARD WALTER: For openers, this is an advanced screenwriting seminar at the UCLA film school – not a private for-profit weekend lecture—that is available both to UCLA and non-UCLA students alike. All students receive 8 college credits. It’s not a one-shot but an on-going six-week series of workshops light on lectures and heavy on in-class writing challenges and analysis of in-progress student pages. It is very much a hands-on writing seminar.

LEE: What will they gain from this class that they can’t derive from the 10,000 screenwriting books out there (including your own)?

RW: It’s a chance to put the principles from those 10,000 screenwriting books (including my own) into use, to try them out in the context of creating a dramatic narrative under the guidance of, well, me. The course is not about books about writing, nor is it even about writing; it is writing.

LEE: How should an aspiring writer judge the “merits” of a screenwriting teacher/guru/consultant. How do you find the “real” ones from the “hucksters?”

RW: Ask around, and ask for references. It can’t be about the marketing–only the writing. Run as fast as you can from anyone who even merely suggests that there’s a good chance after working with him that the writer will win representation and the script will sell.  There are truly excellent consultants available and affordable, and it’s becoming increasingly routine (and in my opinion also smart) to work with a consultant who can ask the hard questions before the studio asks them. One of the most damaging and common mistakes writers make is to show their scripts too soon, before they’re truly ready. I regularly refer writers to worthy consultants.

 LEE: Are Hollywood “pitchfests” useful or a swindle that takes advantage of aspiring writers?

RW: Swindle is a strong word. I’ll only say it’s not called screen-talking.

I’m sure it’s possible to make some connections and get a script considered, but the person doing the considering is likely not authorized to green-light any thing.  He can only pitch it to his bosses. What writer wants someone else pitching his story? The pitcher will likely blow it. “Oh yeah, and there’s something about an iceberg.” Consider also that writers have far greater control over a movie that starts as a spec script compared to one from a pitch.

LEE: How has the screenwriting business changed?

RW: There has never been a greater time to engage the screenwriting racket. When I came to town forty years ago there were seven studios and three broadcast networks. All of those are now toast. The action is in cable and the web, and it’s soaring. This is not the future; it is now. When does anyone see in a theater anything a thousandth as brilliant as a Homeland episode or one from Breaking Bad? This is the golden age of television, except it’s not television. There are exponentially more buyers now operating out of ever-growing companies. There is more product than ever, which means more opportunities for writers (also actors, directors, editors, cinematographers) and expanded offerings for consumers to choose. What’s not to like?

Also, at cable and the web, the producers are the writers and vice versa. They control. In those formats it is not the writer but the director who is “for hire.” There, the writer is the boss, as well she should be.

LEE: Are development executives looking for different things from a script than they were five or ten years ago? Do audiences have different expectations of stories and characters these days?

RW: No, and no. Narrative is narrative. It’s all about story. All audiences care about throughout the millennia is story. Make your screenplay tell a compelling story. Demonstrate in every script your strength as a storytellers

LEE: Are the principles you’re teaching applicable to TV as well as film? What if someone is more interested in writing a spec pilot than a spec feature?

RW: The principles apply to all dramatic narratives, including opera librettos and novels. The only difference between a spec pilot and a spec feature is that the latter is longer.

LEE: Is TV easier to break into than film? Or is it the other way around? And if so, why?

RW: The other way around. Why would anybody want to break into film? Film is in the midst of an unspeakable, smothering war against originality.

LEE:  Are studios and networks relying more on “proven” writers than newbies?

RW: Every experienced, established, successful, adored, wealthy writer without exception was once a newbie. Newbies should take heart in knowing that they are in great company

For further information on Professor Richard Walter’s Summer Class at UCLA visit: www.richardwalter.com.

To enroll and register students can visit: http://www.summer.ucla.edu/EnrollRegister/overview.htm.

To contact the UCLA Registrar’s office for summer classes directly, call (310) 825-4101.

If you have additional questions about Professor Walter’s class, please contact his media manager at kathyAcabrera@yahoo.com or 678.644.4122.

Jonathan Winters on Writing Humor

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00000048Jonathan Winters died today at age 87. My parents used to play all of his comedy records for us when we were kids. Those records made me laugh so hard I had trouble breathing. Jump forward to 1997. I was a novelist and TV writer by then and I was invited to be a guest speaker at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference… on a panel on writing humor with Jonathan Winters and Fannie Flagg. I was honored…and absolutely terrified. What the hell was a nobody like me doing on the same stage as a legend like Winters? But he was incredibly gracious and hilariously funny…and that night is one of the most treasured memories of my career. Here's a recording of that hour-long panel.  Although it's a video, there's only a still photo to look at. The audio track is the panel. The picture here, and in the video, is of my mother Jan Curran and Winters at the conference. Somewhere out there is a picture of me with Winters and Flagg, but I haven't been able to dig it up.

 

Jonathan Winters at Santa Barbara Writers Conference from lee goldberg on Vimeo.

Plotting Death and Destruction

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0609 Lee Goldberg ebook V4 TDMS_5I spent the day Saturday in the company of  a bunch of talented writers to plot a DEAD MAN novel…not just any book, but our biggest tale yet, both in page count and ambition. The story will be published next fall as a Kindle Serial (six to eight, 10,000 word "episodes" that will add up to one, cohesive novel). The project is being written by Phoef Sutton, Lisa Klink and Kate Danley from a shared outline. So series co-creator William Rabkin and I, along with DEAD MAN author David Tully (THE KILLING FLOOR), got together with them and we all spent the day cracking the story in a "writer's room" setting.

Bill, Phoef, Lisa and I are all experienced TV writer/producers, we are very comfortable with the "writer's room" process of hashing out the story as a group, analyzing every character motivation and story beat until we come up with all the moves of the story, which we layout on a white, dry erase board. It was a new experience for Kate and, to a lesser extent, for David, who has been part of a writer's room on some television projects in Germany (where his wife was a network executive).

The writer's room process is wonderful because not only do you benefit from the creativity of everybody in the room, but it also forces you to really explore, analyze and figure out all the angles of your plot and the motivations of your characters.

The group experience also forces you not to give in to the easy, lazy or cliche way of resolving plot and character issues…to go further and dig deeper. It means there are some inevitable frustration or disagreements, but it's all positive…because you end up with a much stronger, more-thought-out story.

It's my favorite part of the TV writing experience…spending hours, days and weeks in a room full of smart, clever, outrageously creative writers…all working to together to tell the best possible story.

Our writers room session for THE DEAD MAN went great. We first discussed character and our over-arching, creative goals for the book. Then we started talking broad plot points. Then we drilled down to the novel equivalent of the eternal TV question: "what do we want our act breaks to be?" (Or, in this case, the "cliff hanger" moment at the end of our six "episodes") And once we had that, we got into the nitty-gritty of the specific beats of each "act."

That's where the real work was. We hashed it out in spirited debates while eating lots of food (and, occasionally, diverging into discussions of lame plot points in SKYFALL and the last BATMAN movie. Do you realize Bond failed at *everything* he did in SKYFALL? He didn't do anything right. Still a great movie, though).

We got started at 10:30 am and by the time we finished around 5:30 pm, we'd plotted out the novel and felt great about what we'd come up with.  Or, as one person in the room put it, we accomplished in one day what it would take an author by himself a month or two to figure out. It's going to be a kick-ass, standalone DEAD MAN novel that requires no previous knowledge of the series to enjoy…but that will also satisfy our loyal fans with a game-changing story that acknowledges past events, answers some long-standing questions, sends Matt Cahill in an exciting, new direction.

Now everybody is writing up their portion of the outline, which Bill and I will cobble together into one document and submit to our editors at Amazon Publishing's 47North imprint for their notes. Once we have their input, the authors will start writing.

I wish I had a writers room for my novels…

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Slaves to Evil
The Midnight Special

Writing on the Fast Track

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Fast Track - Lee GoldbergI've had so much commercial and critical success with my ebook McGRAVE, which was based on an unproduced pilot I wrote for Sony International Television, that I've decided to write novelizations of all of my pilot and TV movie scripts, produced and unproduced, on which I retained the publishing rights. 

So during a brief hiatus between books in 2012, I novelized my first draft screenplay for FAST TRACK, the action movie I wrote and produced for Action Concept and ProSeiben in Berlin a few years ago.

FAST TRACK was a two-hour pilot for an American-style action series that would have been shot in English and German with a cast of American, Canadian, British, French and German actors and followed the lives of four young people in the world of illegal street racing. ProSeiben commissioned the pilot movie and scripts for six episodes. Making the movie, which was directed by Axel Sand and starred Erin Cahill, Andrew Walker, Alexia Barlier and Joseph Beattie, was one of the highlights of my career and the friendships I made during the production continue to this day. It was a fantastic experience professionally, creatively and personally (if you watch the "Making of Fast Track" documentary, I think you'll see why). Unfortunately, the series didn't happen…but perhaps because I've remained close to many of the actors, the characters have stayed fresh in my mind. I haven't been able to let go of them, and have tried to resurrect the project several times over the years (we came close with Cartoon Network, but it fell through).

So I approached the opportunty to revisit the FAST TRACK world with enthusiasm. I used the first draft screenplay as the basis for the book because it had some action elements that we either had to omit or re-imagine due to budget/scheduling/location issues and a prologue that was shot, but that I ultimately cut, in the final edit (I've always regretted cutting the prologue).  

The film took place in Berlin, but I decided the novella would work better in the United States, so that required some rethinking of the characters' backstories and reworking some of the scenes. I also did a complete update on the cars, with the help of Sam Barer, the same technical consultant we used on the movie. 
Fast-Track-No-Limits

I had so much fun writing the FAST TRACK novella that if it does well, I may revisit the characters in sequels based on the twelve episode ideas that I came up with during the development of the pilot (though the stories,which I haven't looked at in years, may have been so Berlin/Europe-centered that they may not work in the new, Los Angeles setting).

But this experience has definitely spurred me on to take a look at my other scripts. I don't know yet which one I will tackle during my next short hiatus.

If you'd like to know more about FAST TRACK, here are some links:

The Making of Fast Track documentary

The Fast Track Trailer

The Fast Track Movie

My Blogs About the Production, Post-Production and Promotion of Fast Track

The Best Time To Be a Writer

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0728 TOP SUSPENSE ecover WRITING ON CRIME_SMIt’s news to no one that the publishing industry has undergone a massive paradigm shift in the last twenty-four months that has changed everything about the business for authors, booksellers, and publishers. But there's one thing that hasn't changed, the most important thing of all, and sadly too many authors aren't paying enough attention to it.

Thanks initially to the introduction of the Kindle, and Amazon opening up their storefront to authors, it’s no longer necessary to have a publisher in order to reach readers.  Authors now have options they never had before for getting their books to a national audience. Being dropped by a publisher, or having your books go out of print, are no longer the kiss of death. On the contrary, they present perhaps more profitable opportunities to exploit your material.

For new authors, it’s no longer necessary to go through the struggle of finding an agent who will then sell their work to a publisher, an odyssey than can take years…if it happens at all. Now it’s the publishers, editors and agent who are struggling ….desperately trying to reinvent themselves in a radically changing business.

Self-publishing is no longer the realm of vanity press vultures preying on aspiring, naïve and desperate authors…nor is it the complicated and outrageously expensive gamble, with pitiful chances of success, that it once was. It’s now possible to publish your book, both electronically and in print, with a mouse click, with little to no upfront investment…and to have your book  on the virtual shelf on equal footing with the likes of  James Patterson and Nora Roberts, at the Amazon and Barnes & Noble storefronts.

Writing careers are being born and, in the case of mid-list authors, reborn.

Now whenever authors get together, we are no longer discussing how we write, or problems with our editors, or tales of life on the road. The talk today is inevitably about reversion of rights letters, book scanning, copyediting, e-book formatting, the nuances of cover art, manipulation of metadata, e-pub vs. mobi, pricing, giveaways, marketing and publicity, social networking, blogging, tagging, liking, tweeting and pinning.

For established, professional writers, coming into self-publishing after years in the “legacy” publishing world, that isn’t such a bad thing.  They’ve learned and perfected their craft (or maybe I am just trying to excuse my own obsession with those aspects of the business). But I’ve listened to new writers at conferences or while lurking on writers’ boards and the newbie writers seem obsessed with everything except what matters most: the writing.

I believe it’s that misguided obsession that s leading to the ethical scandals we’ve been seeing lately… like John Locke who hired people to buy his books and write fake reviews (to artificially boost his rankings and acclaim) to establish himself… and Stephen Leather and RJ Ellory who both used “sock-puppets” on Amazon and social media to generate false buzz and fake reviews to boost their popularity and attack their "rivals."

What authors need to remind themselves is that all of that formatting, pricing, tweeting, social networking, etc. is meaningless if you don’t know how to tell a good story, create compelling characters, develop a strong voice, set a scene, establish a sense of place, or manage point-of-view.

I rarely hear writers anymore talking about the pluses and minuses of out-lining, the importance of an active protagonist, the different kinds of conflict, or the elements of structure. The craft of writing has taken a backseat to the business of publishing.

That’s one reason why the members of Top Suspense, have put together a book called WRITING CRIME FICTION.  We want to get the dialogue started again… to bring writers back to the one thing that will never change, even as the publishing business reinvents itself.

People want a good story.

That’s why writers write and readers buy books. Good stories. Great characters. That's what matters. Not whether you should write an erotic novel to cash in on FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY… or maybe focus on a YA novels since the HUNGER GAMES series is so hot.

Writers have been handed a great opportunity in the last twenty-four months. We now have tremendous control over our creative and financial lives as writers that we never had before. We now have choices that simply didn’t exist before.

Don’t blow it. Don’t become so focused on the business that you forget the craft. Take advantage of the freedom, and the opportunities, and the new choices by focusing on telling great stories.  Hone your craft, Find your voice…focus and less on how the story is packaged, sold and promoted. Help us shift the balance back to where it belongs…

Storytelling.

Writing Good Sex

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Hot-topic-sexThe trick to writing good sex scenes is the words you choose to do it. The words you use to describe sex…and the body parts…has to be a reflection of the characters and their attitudes…and the overall tone of the book.

To me, writing a sex scene is less about the sex itself than what the scene is supposed to accomplish as far as revealing character or furthering the plot. It shouldn’t just be there to turn the reader on…even if you’re writing erotica. The sex act, in and of itself, will be mere coupling between two creatures…and certainly won’t be compelling, entertaining or arousing if the reader isn’t emotionally invested in the characters.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, from my book WATCH ME DIE.

I guess something I learned from “Mannix” was true. Being a private eye really is an aphrodisiac to women. Carol had never attacked me like that before.

I’m afraid the surprise and excitement were too much, because I came in about three minutes. But I don’t think Carol minded; it calmed me down and allowed me to concentrate real hard on getting her off. And believe me, it took my complete attention. Pleasing a woman, especially Carol, isn’t easy and with me, at least, there’s a lot of potential for embarrassment and humiliation.

She rewarded me for all my hard work with a nice, squealing, writhing orgasm that nearly broke my nose on her pubic bone, but I didn’t mind. I even jumped in, literally, to enjoy the last few squeals of it with her.

It was so dark, and things happened so fast, she never saw my cuts and bruises, so she mistook my occasional groans of pain for pleasure.

Carol fell right to sleep afterwards.

Between the sex, the pain, and the things on my mind, I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have liked. But I get laid so rarely, I’m willing to sacrifice just about anything for it, especially sleep, when I usually dream about having sex anyway.

While the scene is explicit, more by implication than actual description, it’s not about the choreography or body parts. It’s about attitude and character — or, at least, I hope it is. To me, that’s how you get around the pitfalls of writing the sex scene.

I am so tired of sex scenes in thrillers where the lovers are confident and fantastic, erections last forever, the women are multi-orgasmic, and nobody leaves the scorched bed anything but extremely satisfied beyond their wildest, erotic dreams.

It was one of the sexual cliches I was trying to puncture with the sex scenes in WATCH ME DIE. My protagonist, Harvey Mapes, is anything but a perfect lover. In fact, most of the time, he comes way too soon and finds most aspects of sex, besides his own desire for lots of it, confusing and fraught with potential disappointment, humiliation and recrimination. It was so much easier, and so much more fun, to write that scene than the cliched, high-performance, sex that is the norm in the mysteries and thrillers that I read.

So the bottom line of writing great sex, in my opinion, is to give the scene an authentic, emotional or thematic foundation so that it’s about more than the sex itself — it’s telling a story by revealing character and reinforcing the novel’s core themes.

It’s a Crime

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0728 TOP SUSPENSE ecover WRITING ON CRIME_SMThe 12 critically acclaimed, award-winning thriller writers at Top Suspense, including yours truly, have shared everything they know about their craft in the new book Writing Crime Fiction, which is garnering some terrific reviews, like this one from Book Chase, where he says, in part:

Wannabe mystery writers will find in Writing Crime Fiction what they need to accomplish their goal.  Lee Goldberg’s “Double Take” chapter and Libby Hellmann’s chapter entitled “Jack Bauer and Me: Building Suspense” offer detailed insights into the construction of a crime novel.  Goldberg discusses in detail the bones that hold crime novels together, the frame upon which all good crime fiction is carefully built, while Hellmann takes a similar approach to the sub-genre of “suspense” novels. […]The real beauty of Writing Crime Fiction, I think, is that it offers something for all of us, writer and reader alike.  If you want to try your hand at writing a crime novel, this is the book for you.  If you want to better understand why you love crime fiction so much – and how it all comes together – here are the answers. 

It’s the Story, Stupid

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TOP SUSPENSE BLOG HEADER 3Seems to me that authors are losing track of what really matters… not the formatting, covers, tweeting, pinning and promotion…it's the story, stupid. I blog about it today at Top Suspense. Here's an excerpt:

I’ve listened to new writers at conferences or while lurking on writers’ boards and the newbie writers seem obsessed with everything except what matters most: the writing.

I believe it’s that misguided obsession that s leading to the ethical scandals we’ve been seeing lately… like John Locke who hired people to buy his books and write fake reviews (to artificially boost his rankings and acclaim) to establish himself… and Stephen Leather and RJ Ellory who both used “sock-puppets” on Amazon and social media to generate false buzz and fake reviews to boost their popularity and attack their "rivals."

What authors need to remind themselves is that all of that formatting, pricing, tweeting, social networking, etc. is meaningless if you don’t know how to tell a good story, create compelling characters, develop a strong voice, set a scene, establish a sense of place, or manage point-of-view.

I rarely hear writers anymore talking about the pluses and minuses of out-lining, the importance of an active protagonist, the different kinds of conflict, or the elements of structure. The craft of writing has taken a backseat to the business of publishing.

Slaves to Evil

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Slaves to Evil CoverToday marks the debut of Lisa Klink's THE DEAD MAN #11: SLAVES TO EVIL, her first published novel. She's also the first woman (so far) to contribute to the series, which is published more-or-less monthly by Amazon's 47North imprint. Here's the plot…

Matt Cahill has an unusual gift: he can see the corruption in people’s souls, making the afflicted appear as walking corpses to his eyes. This macabre ability has set him on a one-man crusade to eradicate these servants of an ancient and powerful evil, embodied by the aptly named “Mr. Dark.”

On his way through the small town of Breckenridge, Minnesota, Matt sees the unmistakable signs of corruption in the chief of police and numerous cops. The evil that has consumed them now terrorizes innocents and allows drug and sex trafficking to run rampant. Just as Matt confronts the enslaved cops, a gun-toting teen appears, looking to make Matt pay for murdering her brother. Of course, Matt did kill her brother—he was another corrupted soul who’d been planning a bombing. But how can Matt convince Elena of the truth without any proof?

Trapped between Mr. Dark’s forces and a girl hell-bent on revenge, Matt faces an impossible choice: remove Elena—permanently—or let her kill him and doom the town.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Lisa has spent years toiling in the trenches of primetime television, as a writer/producers on shows like Star Trek Voyager and Missing…and has even written a Las Vegas strip tourist attraction (The Star Trek Experience, which was at the Hilton for years) . So I thought I'd invite her over here for a chat about her career and her creative process. 

How did you become a writer?

I’ve written stories ever since I knew how to write.  I wrote a play in college and graduated with an English major.  After college, I moved to L.A. to work in Hollywood.  At first, I wanted to write movies.  Then I tried writing a TV spec script and found I liked that better.  I took a UCLA Extension class in TV writing from Bill Rabkin, which I really enjoyed.  I had been pitching stories to the Star Trek series “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager,” and finally sold one to DS9.  That was my first produced episode.  It led to a staff job on “Voyager.” 

What do you enjoy most about being a writer?

I love the feeling when I get a moment of action or line of dialogue just right.  It’s like thinking of exactly the right comeback to an argument (usually in the car on the way home).  For a few minutes, I feel like a genius.  Then it’s back to work.  I also like the problem-solving aspect of writing, figuring out the right order for the scenes and which clues to drop where.

What drew you to "The Dead Man?"

I was lucky enough to work with Lee and Bill on two TV series, “Martial Law” and “Missing.”  We became friends.  I heard about the “Dead Man” series they were working on and told them it sounded like fun.  So they asked if I’d like to write one of the books.  I jumped at the chance.  I was right – it has been fun.

You've written scores of produced screenplays, but this was your first, published book. Did you find the transition to prose tricky?

Yes, it was tricky.  TV writing is very sparse and functional.  A script isn’t a final product in itself, but a blueprint for an episode.  If something won’t be on screen, it doesn’t go in the script.  With this book, I had to push myself to include more description, emotion and inner thoughts of the characters.  There would be no set design or actors to add those elements later.  Lisa Klink Photo by Kat Shadian

You've spent many years writing and producing TV series, some of them with Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin. How was writing "Slaves to Evil" different than writing an episode of a TV series? In what ways was it the same?

I found it challenging to write prose after years of scripts.  The biggest advantage of a book over TV is the complete lack of budget and network restrictions.  I could have as many sets and characters as I wanted.  I could use bad words and nasty violence with no censor to stop me.  That was fun. 

This experience was like TV writing because the premise and main characters had already been established.  I had always found the idea of writing a novel intimidating because I’d have to create the whole universe from scratch.  This was the perfect transitional step.  Also, I was already comfortable working with Lee and Bill, so I knew I had good support. 

You've written TV shows, comics, books….you even scripted the "Borg Invasion 4-D" attraction that ran for years at the Hilton in Las Vegas. They are such different mediums. How do you do it? Do you have one guiding philosophy or approach to the writing that you do? What sort of writing do you like best? 

I honestly don’t think I have a preference.  I’m most comfortable with television, but I really enjoy the challenge of working in different media.  Whatever the format, good writing always comes down to story and character.  I have to get those right first.  Then it’s a matter of shaping the script to fit the final product.

Now that you've written a book, are you tempted to write another outside of "The Dead Man" universe?

I would love to write more books.  I read a lot of nonfiction, so I’d like to try that next.  I also have a couple of ideas brewing for original novels.  I’ll always keep writing, in as many different media as I can.  New experiences and new challenges keep it interesting.


Giddy Up to Amazon

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The Amazon Daily Post published my essay today on how westerns influenced the writing of KING CITY, my new novel. Here's an excerpt:

A western puts a man in a lawless, unforgiving, brutal frontier, where he must somehow survive by living off the land, his wits, and his own rigid code. It’s that last bit, I think, that is the core of it all: a personal code of conduct that’s constantly, relentlessly, put to the test.

A true western character ultimately prevails against adversity because of a stubborn, unwavering faith in his own convictions and the righteousness of his cause, a determination to see the world shaped the way he wants it to be, rather than let himself be shaped by it. He doesn’t try to explain or justify himself because it’s pointless. His actions speak for him.

And as iconic and old-fashioned as that all may be, it’s so refreshing in a world where everyone, particularly heroes in crime fiction, are so self-aware and self-obsessed, so eager to accept the moral, ethical, professional, legal ambiguities in a situation rather than take a principled stand on something, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong to everyone else.