'An unstable way to live'

Lifestyle/Technology: A former nun takes by storm the life of a Hollywood screenwriter | Susan Olasky

Screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi gets up early and writes for four or five hours in her pajamas before leaving her apartment in the Hollywood Hills and going to church at noon. After church she walks and listens to her iPod, which she calls "a great gift to the world."

Regardless of what Nicolosi is doing, her mind is never far from the story she's trying to tell: "When you're working as a storyteller you are never not writing. It's always on the corner of your frontal lobe. . . . It's like living with a crossword puzzle."

Nicolosi is an intense, fast-talking former nun. Still a Catholic, she carries hints of her New Jersey roots in her voice. She's speaking in Austin at a Transforming Culture symposium—something that she doesn't do all that often. In between sessions, she leans forward in her chair to explain the problem she's been wrestling with for three months—how to show, in a script set during the French Revolution, that a Carmelite nun has turned to the dark side. Show, don't tell: "What can she do to show she's lost her faith?"