Story Makers Show

In this week’s podcast we discuss the before and the after of realizing a project. In it, I consider the logistics of when to print out my manuscript, and Angie reflects on her almost picture locked film Lost in the Middle. We chat about the limitations of technology and the need to prioritize, as well as what we have learned throughout our own processes. I also ask Angie about what she would keep in mind for the next project while recognizing the reality of deadlines.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Hannah Gadsby

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Sonoma County Writers Camp - Scene Workshop with Elizabeth Stark and Ellen Sussman from October 10-14

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

In today’s theme-park themed episode, we talk about what we can learn from amusement parks about story and more. Topics include the journey of waiting in line, the impact of production design, and creating the whole experience from start to finish using narrative, voice, world, sound and all the senses. We discuss the ways those 3D rides both fool and fail to fool your senses.

We also talk about structure, deadlines and motivation: reasons to take a class, even in your area of expertise, and the similarities and differences between classes.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

We had a terrific conversation with arts organizer, filmmaker, multi-media artists and writer Celeste Chan. We talked about The Queer Ancestors Project and the writing portion of the program for queer and trans youth that Celeste started this year. She had some great advice for them that works for us, too: normalize the blocks. “Sometimes is is just really hard,” she acknowledges. Strategies for dealing with this include breaking down the writing process, lowering your expectations, and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Vertical Read, a very cool writing exercise for finding the fragments, phrases and words that “have some heat” in your work. In talking about the obstacles, Celeste noted that while we often struggle to write, story requires obstacles to function. We talked about her process in creating and screening her documentary in progress about Riot Grrl. That lead to talking about coming out into riot grrls, finging riot grrl at the library, becoming polticized, reading zines and getting schooled in her community arts organizing that continues to this day. We also talked about the challenges and pleasures of finding balance and inspiration between mentoring and creating. About audience--expanding and narrowing it, juggling the experimental with accessibility, resonating across generations, writing with intimacy, explaining and leaving things unexplained. And another terrific exercise from Celeste inspired by James Baldwin. Links in the bio and below.

Dorothy Allison

Mini Nguyen’s Evolution of a Race Riot

Celeste Chan writes, makes films, performs, teaches, facilitates, and organizes cultural events. The child of a Chinese immigrant father and a Bronx Jewish mother, she came out queer as a teenager living in Seattle during the 1990’s. Inspired by riot grrrl, Celeste started making films at The Evergreen State College and earned her BA in International Feminism. Since that time, she’s joined film collectives (Shifting Narratives, Folsom St. Film Collective) and won several awards and fellowships (Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, VONA, Soaring Gardens, and SF Arts Commission). Her recent films, Queer Historical Mixtape (with Irina Contreras), and ABSENCE: No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians have screened at screened at colleges & national/international festivals. She’s at work on a film, Art Heart. Her writing can be found in Ada, AWAY, Citron Review, cream city review, Feminist Wire, Hyphen, The Rumpus, and more. From 2008-2018, she co-directed Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project. A lifelong student of alternative education, Celeste coordinates Writing Rainbow: QTPOC FREE School series and serves as Teaching Artist at the Queer Ancestors Project, where she facilitates free writing workshops for LGBTQ youth 18-24 years old. She’s a contributing editor for Foglifter. www.celestechan.com

Photo by Yuska Lutfi Tuanakotta

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

The fabulous Vicki DeArmon of All Things Book joins us to talk about the publishing industry and what prospective authors need to know to succeed, and how to marshall your resources and see what you can do in the face of the short shelf life, unpredictable market, and changing, shortening seasons of the industry. We also talk about Book Expo America, the state of the industry, including some good news, the relationship between creativity and the market, collaboration and integration, resources and more. This episode also touches on tension, withholding, self-editing and short scenes, the value of thinking differently from everyone else, and the ‘90s publishing world in San Francisco.

All Things Book

Vicki DeArmon has been in the publishing business for 30 years. She started her career by founding Foghorn Press in San Francisco in 1985 at the age of 25 and, as its publisher, growing it to a multi-million dollar enterprise publishing 20 titles a year before selling in it in 2001. From 2008 to 2016, she served as the Marketing & Events Director for Copperfield’s Books eight stores, developing its nationally recognized events program. She’s produced thousands of author events, specializing in creating large collaborations which she continues to do through her new company All Things Book. She also consults to the book trade. And occasionally, she pop-ups as a bookseller at events that interest her such as the Sonoma County Writers Camp. She’s a writer of short fiction that has won some acclaim but her interrupted MA from San Francisco State University (1985) is testimony to the tension between her two passions, entrepreneurship and writing.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

It was great to catch up with Marian Palaia from her home in Missoula where she was a day or so away from a final, ready-to-submit to publishers draft of her next novel. We delved into the parts of writing we hate and why, the agony of waiting for a response, countering the criticism that a novel is quiet, the tricks of adding tension to a story, working against Chekhov’s gun rule, the possibilities of chronological order, flashforwards, questions, the refusal to outline, where to start, and then starting over again...and again...and again, empathy, time and poetry’s sudden turns. We also touched on what you need to know when you are negotiating with an editor who wants to buy your book!

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room

Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life

Rabih Alamedine’s I, the Divine

An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn

Tom McGuane Panama

Facebook link for Marian Palaia

The Given World by Marian Palaia

Levon by Elton John

Owen Meany by John Irving

Joan Frank

Peter Carey

Marian Palaia’s first novel, “The Given World,” (Simon and Schuster, 2015) was shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, longlisted for The PEN/Bingham First Novel Prize, a finalist for the VCU/Cabell Award, and recognized by Kirkus as a Best Novel of 2015. She lives in San Francisco, California and in Missoula, Montana with her Mongolian Barking Shepherd, Tupelo. In the early 1980s she was the littlest logger in Lincoln, Montana, and neighbor, sort of, to Ted Kaczynski. Her second novel, “We Would be Amazed, if We Weren’t Already,” is forthcoming.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

In today’s episode, we discuss non-traditional narratives and shaking it all up. Angie reviews the framework of the 7 Steps of Story and the importance of character psychology and the protagonist’s limiting belief in developing plot. Want to break out from that structure? Get clear on your goal, the reason you want to break the mold/ rules, and what you are trying to do and then try going backwards, reorganizing elements, using POV to limit information, creating an altered consciousness and controlling information. We also talk about how we’ve applied and broken from these principles in our own work, conscious versus unconscious creativity, tracking and organizing your work, the challenges of teaching writing or describing the writing process, ignoring the voice in your head that is full of doubt, observing character and group dynamics in the real world, theme, and, yes, more...

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Momento

Tony Kushner Angels in America

Linda Aheensen 21st Century Screenplay

Requiem for a Dream

Girl on a Train

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonard Carrington

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith

The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley

Carolina deRobertis episode

Sonoma Country Writers Camp Free Class

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

Today we are answering a listener question about making ordinary actions significant in a story--the moments such as having dinner v. the moments of jumping off a bridge to save your own life. What makes readers care? What makes readers pay attention? We dig the importance of character: character change, character reaction to the given events, and the breaking of a character’s cardinal rules. We examine the roles stakes and history play in making a moment matter. Cliche, expectation and subtext feature as factors. And we muck about in Elizabeth Strout’s brilliant short story “The Sign,” from her linked collection/ novel ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. Angie asks, How do you chose the detail that signifies?

Other topics include:

the courage to make/ let a lot happen on the page.

ways to fill the well, including artist dates, inspiring websites, and shaking up your own routine

Elizabeth Strout Anything is Possible

The Artist’s Way

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

A listener asks how we teach thesis/ antithesis/ synthesis and we tackle that from many angles, beginning with Elizabeth’s Marxist/ Stalinist grandmother, her one-time boyfriend John Howard Lawson, author of Theory and Technique of Playwrighting, and on through Laos Egri, Pilar Alessandra, Sarah Manguso and more. We discuss the difference between using these techniques for drafting and using them for revision, and touch briefly on the role of oppositional ideas in both politics and creativity, including the fight for gay marriage. From character through dialog and on to theme, we dig into thesis/ antithesis/ synthesis.

Little Man Tate

Black-ish

Sarah Manguso 300 Arguments

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Julia Cameron

Laos Egri

Pilar Alessandra

John Howard Lawson

Ted Olsen

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie and Elizabeth look at how the busy person (and who isn’t?) makes time, finds time, steals time for writing. How to have your writer’s toolbelt stocked and ready at all times, walking and dictating with app advice, writing while asleep, writing before you speak, writing in short sprints, in small windows, letting go, setting expectations and intentions, and giving up perfection--of circumstance and of product. We also touch on the infinite and mutable self, inspired free writing, creating complexity through meaningful contradictions, and stealing our idols’ approaches and attitudes. If you struggle to squeeze writing into your life, this is the episode for you.

Robert Olen Butler

Steven Soderbergh

Ira Glass

Ariel Gore

Pilar Alexandra The Coffee Break Screenwriter

Peter Coyote

Jennifer Egan

Ann Patchett

Carol Wolf

Janis Cooke Newman on Story Makers Show

Creative Caffeine Daily

Dragon Anywhere

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

Thrillingly, we talked with one of Elizabeth’s favorite story gurus (who would probably reject the title and certainly any authoritarian implications that might attend it), Matt Bird, the author of The Secrets of Story. We talk Game of Thrones and ask and answer the question, What makes a story good enough to pull in even unconvinced readers? Warm language, intimacy, hope--this doesn’t sound like masochism, does it? But we get into the right way to be antagonistic with your reader, the importance and limitations of irony, the value of finding your story and ways to do so, and how to use a checklist (specifically, Matt’s 122 item checklist) without inhibiting your creativity. Other topics include unreliable narrators, upsetting rather than merely defying the reader’s expectations, breaking your own rules and writing what you don’t know. We dig into what stories teach us about solving problems and what solving problems teaches us about story. And much more.

Matt’s blog Secretsofstory.com

The Secrets of Story by Matt Bird

Narrative Breakdown podcast

How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely

The Fighter (film)

Lisa Cron Wired for Story

Lisa Cron Story Genius

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Author Sere Prince Halverson

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.