Fear and wonderment in a limitless world: Learning to write from a child’s point of view

During my 25 years working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, I developed a reputation as a writer who could craft vivid and believable scripts about young people. Initially, this was based on my teleplay for the first episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories series, and later for the semi-autobiographical Josh and S.A.M. released by Columbia Pictures. I also wrote uncredited revisions of DreamWorks’s Small Soldiers and Castle Rock’s Alaska, both involving prominent child characters. I have to confess that my reputation for writing content for children and adolescents realistically did not stem from any natural ability. It came from mining my personal childhood memories, and from studying movies and literature I felt authentically captured what it is like to be new in the world. This text explores my journey writing from a child’s perspective.