Gerald DiPego

Gerald DiPego is best known for his career as a screenwriter for over thirty Hollywood movies including The Forgotten, Words and Pictures, Message in a Bottle, Sharky’s Machine, Instinct, and Phenomenon. He wrote award-winning scripts for TV films, and then went on to write plays which have been produced on many California stages, with his popular drama 154 and Paradise returning to Santa Barbara over the years for multiple encore performances.

His published books include thrillers, his coming-of-age story Cheevey, and his how-to book WRITE: Find the Truth in Your Fiction! which shares tips on creative writing, drawn from his long and fruitful career as an author.

In recent years, he’s written many short stories, often sharing them as live readings on stage. Many of these tales were inspired by his early years growing up in the lake towns of rural Illinois, and he gradually began to synthesize four of these into a novel-length collection of linked stories, finally culminating in his new publication of LAKETOWN: a novel in stories. DiPego now lives and writes in California’s Santa Ynez Valley.