Allan Halcrow may have waited until he was in his forties to have his first time (as a screenwriter, that is), but he is no stranger to the primal battle between the creative impulse and a blank page.

Archaeologists excavating his grandmother's files recently unearthed a serious-minded critique of Disneyland written when he was five; the Submarine Voyage earned top marks. Some undated material in the file suggests he was probably writing before then, and later material suggests a burst of inspired productivity beginning when he was in fourth grade. At that time he identified a gaping vacuum in the information flow at his elementary school and responded by writing, editing, printing and distributing an all-school newspaper. Readers may decide whether that effort is a good example of youthful industry or ego run amok.

By the time he got to junior high school he was invited to write the lyrics to the school song. That remains his sole venture into songwriting, though he's still waiting for a call from Marvin Hamlisch or someone. Around this same time, he discovered that he could also rearrange or revise other people's words. In any other line of work this would be called vandalism, but he called it "editing." He edited the school literary magazine and the high school yearbook and anything else that people would let him improve.

Next up was a stint at UCLA, where he helped edit the literary magazine and criticized other people's writing in the Daily Bruin. While in school he got his first magazine job, a part-time stint at Orange Coast magazine. The pay wasn't great (non-existent, to be strictly accurate) but the perks were great: he went to Hollywood parties and ate at great restaurants.

Once he graduated, he went to work for a magazine called Interface Age, which was about PC applications in small businesses. It was there that he discovered he could quickly assimilate information and vocabulary and write credibly about subjects in which he could claim no expertise. That led to a job at Personnel Journal (later Workforce), which was a magazine about personnel (later human resources) management - a subject he eventually learned everything about. He stayed for 16 years, during which he won several awards almost as prestigious as the Oscar.

After leaving the magazine, he co-wrote two books. The first one, The Boss's Survival Guide, was a Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com bestseller. The second one, Gray Matters: A Workplace Survival Guide, was ahead of its time and will be justly celebrated for its genius long after he's dead. He's also worked freelance for a wide variety of clients (go ahead, ask him anything about engineered standards or breast implants).