Story Makers Show

Kirsty Starkey works as a producer at BBC Radio 4’s acclaimed show Woman’s Hour, “the programme that offers a female perspective on the world.” She researches and develops stories, finds and interviews potential subjects, prepares the presenters for live on-air interviews, and more. In this episode, we discuss the similarities and differences between Woman’s Hour stories and novels, films or narrative non-fiction. We look at the journalistic need for balance alongside the risks and vulnerability of interviewees, and the desire to present the human angle that is also relevant to now. We examined how to narrow, shape, and focus a story. We looked at what can go wrong, such as ways a story might die on the vine or a subject might freeze up live on air. We discussed who the protagonist might be in the radio stories: the human interest subjects, or perhaps even the listener. The conversation includes tips on interviewing from a BCC veteran, and the ways the ability to ask questions makes a massive difference in getting strong stories.

Desert Island Discs

Woman's Hour

Rose Remain

Kirsty Starkey works as a producer at BBC Radio 4’s acclaimed show Woman’s Hour, “the programme that offers a female perspective on the world.” She researches and develops stories, finds and interviews potential subjects, prepares the presenters for live on-air interviews, and more.

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 tackle three tough questions today, two on dialogue and one on how to make more room for writing.

Links Discussed:

Cornelia Nixon

Pilar Alessandra and On The Page Podcast

Denis Johnson

Brian Tracy

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 were thrilled to sit down with Book Writing World alum Gretchen Atwood to discuss her newly released book, Lost Champions: Four Men, Two Teams, and the Breaking of Pro Football's Color Line, and get some great tips about balancing research and writing, evaluating and choosing your sources, making use of research to create scene, and where the line between imagination and invention falls in nonfiction. Gretchen gave us a terrific breakdown of pulling details from a variety of sources to create a single, rich scene. She talked about writing a book proposal and finding an agent, about narrative structure and the ways that the research did and didn’t change the book from the way it was described in the proposal. She talked about working with a developmental editor, about various note-taking and color-coding strategies and their limitations, and about taking an emotional v. an analytical approach to building your book. We even got into the parallels between the structure of a ball game and the structure of a book.

Send us your questions about writing and the writing life to [email protected]

Links We Discussed:

Come see Elizabeth in conversation with author Gayle Forman: 

WSJ article on Lost Champions: 

Peanuts by Charles Schulz http://www.peanuts.com/

http://GretchenAtwood.com

Lea Page has mentored Steiner-Waldorf homeschooling mothers for a decade and has many years experience as a La Leche League leader. She and her husband homeschooled both their children in rural Montana. Lea has studied education, literature and leadership. She now lives and writes in New Hampshire.

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.

This week we started a new element in Story Makers Show. Interspersed with the in-depth interviews with authors, filmmakers and industry professionals, we are going to offer brief podcasts that answer your questions about writing. Yes, yours: write to us a @[email protected] or post them on the Story Makers Show page on Facebook or hit reply to this newsletter and ask away!

This episode we discuss finding readers who will be the best critics for your work, deciding if a project is fiction or non-fiction, and organizing your book when you have a lot of material and feel overwhelmed.

Links Discussed:

Scrivener

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.

With a deep background in both deadline journalism and mindfulness meditation, Jennifer Mattson teaches classes in getting unstuck that emphasize an acceptance of the cycle of getting stuck and unstuck. In our wonderful conversation she shares wisdom and practical tools for going through--and getting through--this process, as well as advice for pitching, an art she knows and discusses from the receiving and throwing end, and making a living as a freelance writer

Kripa Lu retreat center

Julia Cameron

Aaron Sorkin class

Jennifersmattson.com

Jennifer Mattson is a writer, editor and  journalist. She writes The Wellness List column for Psychology Today and teaches writing workshops at New York University, as well as, around the country. She reports on news, women’s issues, yoga, healthy living and mindfulness, books, arts and culture.

She was awarded the Spring 2016 Writer-in-Residence at The Lemon Tree House Residency for Writers in Tuscany, Italy and is the recipient of the prestigious scholarship for non-fiction writers at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was recently selected as a member of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto.

She is a former network news producer for CNN, CNN International and National Public Radio.  She spent over six years as a producer for CNN, where she was responsible for CNN’s daily live newscasts and produced CNN’s international coverage. Jennifer came to CNN to work in the Washington bureau’s political unit during the 1996 U.S. presidential election. She later moved to Atlanta, where she worked first as a writer and then as a newscast producer at CNN International. Prior to joining CNN, Jennifer worked as a reporter based in Budapest, Hungary covering Eastern Europe, where she reported on a number of regional stories as a stringer for USA TODAY including pieces on George Soros and the Clinton-Yeltsin CSCE Summit. After leaving CNN, she worked as a producer for the NPR show The Connection, as an editor at NPR’s Tell Me More, and spent two years as the Managing Editor of AsiaSociety.org. From there she moved to Hong Kong and reported from Asia. Since returning to the U.S., she has worked on the CBS News Foreign Desk, and as a breaking news writer for both CBSNews.com and  GlobalPost.com.

Her writing and reporting has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, Salon, USA TODAY, The Boston Globe, GlobalPost.com, The Women’s Review of Books, Ms. Magazine,The Women’s Media Center and Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health where she is currently a Contributing Writer. She has a new column at PsychologyToday.com,The Wellness List and co-authored 642 Things To Write About Me. She is working on her next book.

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.

Jean Kawahara is a documentary editor as well as a writer, and she had great insights into the process of shaping real life events into a story. How do you wrangle thousands of hours of footage into a compelling, small package--on deadline? How do you find, create or support drama? What do you look for when you're looking for story? We talked about forms for crafting story: contests, chronology, rhythm  and the need for omission. We discussed stakes and consequences and how to set them up, the importance of avoiding repeat beats, and the fact that directors and writers often miss perceive which are actually the strongest scenes. We got into the dangers of the desire to explain to your audience what’s going on in your story and the attention span of the modern audience. Jean gave advice about avoiding the fine work before you nail down the broad structure, so you don't get attached to one way of seeing the story unfold. And we looked at endings: how to find and craft an authentic ending out of the ongoing flow of life...

Links Discussed:

Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker

T-Rex, documentary film

Book in a Year

Sergei M. Eisenstein

Claudia Rankings keynote speech at AWP

On James Patterson's publishing collaborative work

Adrienne Rich’s Poetry Became Political, but It Remained Rooted in Material Fact by Wayne Koestenbaum

Hamilton, the musical

Stories We Tell, Directed by  Sarah Polley

The Literature of War: Who gets to tell the story?

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.

Joyce has an amazing, important story to tell about an artist, Joyce’s twin sister Judy, who had so much against her--undiagnosed deafness, Down’s Syndrome in a time when differences were institutionalized, and years away from her family--only to find her artistic “voice” when in their middle age Joyce gained guardianship of Judy and brought her to California and to Creative Growth. Judy became a world-famous artist--and Joyce became a lyrical, honest writer who tells this tale in her new memoir, Entwined: Sisters and Secrets in the Silent World of Artist Judith Scott. We talk about editing and shaping a memoir: what gets cut and what gets kept. We dig into ways of accessing your material, including journaling, wine drinking, storytelling, research early morning writing habits, live writing as things are happening, and note taking or recording your voice while you're walking, or running, or doing anything repetitive. We discuss the importance of writing groups and how to start them, thinking in terms of fiction versus thinking in terms of nonfiction, creating composite characters and how to write dialog for nonfiction. We look at the impact Judy's increasing fame did and did not have on her and how that might be a model for all of us who create--and indeed of the need to create art under any circumstances. Other topics touched on: the crankiness caused by not writing, the entitlement of the artist and her self regard, the ways that people with a variety of abilities can live and create together, the importance of making mistakes, and the principles of simplicity.

Links Discussed:

Donna Levin

The Story Makers Show - Meredith Maren episode

The Girls Who Went Away – on Amazon and Indiebound

Anne Lamott

Failed It on Amazon and Indiebound

The Larche Community in France

Facebook: Judith Scott artist and Joyce Scott

Web site: JudithandJoyce.com

Entwined by Joyce Scott on Amazon and Indiebound

Joyce Scott, MA,  is the twin sister of Judith Scott. As an RN and developmental specialist she has worked for many years with children with Down Syndrome and other special needs. A long-time resident of Berkeley, California, Joyce has dedicated her life to helping mothers and children. She is also a poet, writer and clinical hypnotherapist.

As an advocate for people with disabilities, she has spoken at international conferences and events in Ireland, England, France and Asia. She has appeared on television in Europe and the United States and spoken at museum and gallery openings, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.In 2011 Joyce attended the opening of a major exhibition of Judith's work in London., during which she appeared on a popular BBC arts program, and participated as guest speaker on several public discussion forums.  She then went on to the opening of another exhibition in Paris, and again served on a public discussion panel.

Joyce serves on the advisory board of Creative Growth, the first art center in  the world for  artists with disabilities. She is a founding director of Birthways, a referral and educational service for pregnant women and new mothers.  She is also founder of the Bali Children's Project, a non-profit dedicated to providing educational and art opportunities for  young people in rural Bali.  She is currently engaged in establishing a studio and workshop for artists with disabilities in the mountains of Bali.

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.

Guilt, failure, negative reviews… We dig into the good stuff and the hard stuff with the wonderful Brian Hurley, a publisher, editor and passionate reviewer of books, including what authors need to know going into publishing. We discuss why, when a book wins an award, it's Amazon ratings will actually go down! Big publishers operated on a "Hollywood model" where a few successes support many "failures," and Brian looks at the alternative small presses supply, plus the importance of knowing what you want out of publishing. We also talked about book reviewing as a creative and intellectual and exciting activity, what makes a strong review and the process of writing one, and the broad and deep and eclectic way Brian immersed himself in the art of the book review until he understood the form and its patterns. Brian is knee-deep in forthcoming book. What's that like? How does he choose which books to review? Hint: "Henry James is going to have to wait." We got into how editing impacts his writing. He writes the marketing copy as he writes his book, again and again, sometimes letting the marketing copy lead the plot. In addition to running Fiction Advocate, a small press and online publication interested in the cross-pollinations of criticism, personal essay and fiction, he works for Callisto Media, a start-up book publisher, that uses an SEO model with a high rate of success: "we don't publish any splashy books, but they rarely, rarely fail." We discuss both these ventures as well as who should not review books, father-son relationships, dead dads, and more.

Links Discussed:

Matthew Galloway

Isaac Fitzgerald Interview

Maria Bustillos on Isaac Fitzgerald

Ethan Canin interview on Terri Gross

Brian Hurley is Books Editor at The Rumpus and an Editor at Fiction Advocate. His literary criticism has appeared in The Millions, Electric Literature, and Full Stop. Formerly the linguistics editor at Oxford University Press, he is now a Senior Managing Editor at Callisto Media in Berkeley, CA.

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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 an inspiring and far-ranging conversation with feminist economist Myra Strober about her new memoir, Sharing the Work:What My Family and Career Taught Me About Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others). We examined differences between memoir writing, fiction, and academic writing, and how Myra used theme as a filter to shape and cut her memoir. We talked about changing names, asking for permission, and sharing the work ahead of time with the people who are in it; uses of summary and scene and the balance between the two; tight writing and loose writing; memory versus invention in scene and especially in dialogue, and the unexpected relationship between truth and guessing. We delved into the economics of being a writer, and into writing habits or the lack thereof, and into time as a character. Literacy and its far-ranging impacts came up, as did dream writing, writing in dreams, and writing in the middle of the night.

Ellen Sussman

Diane Middlebrook/ her biography of Anne Sexton

Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse

Y Tu Mama Tambien

Bill Clegg Did You Ever Have a Family?

MryaStrober.com

Sharing the Work:What My Family and Career Taught Me About Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others)

Myra Strober is a labor economist and Professor Emerita at the School of Education at Stanford University. She is also Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University (by courtesy). Myra’s research and consulting focus on gender issues at the workplace, and work and family. She is the author of numerous articles on occupational segregation, women in the professions and management, the economics of childcare, feminist economics and the teaching of economics. She is also co-author, with Agnes Chan, of The Road Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family in the United States and Japan (1999).

Myra is officially retired, but she continues to teach a course on work and family at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Myra was the founding director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. She was also the first chair of the National Council for Research on Women (now called Re: Gender), a consortium of U.S. centers for research on women, which today has more than 100 member centers. Myra was President of the International Association for Feminist Economics, and Vice President of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (now Legal Momentum). She was an associate editor of Feminist Economics and a member of the Board of Trustees of Mills College.

Over the years, Myra has consulted with several corporations on improved utilization of women in management and on work-family issues. She has also been an expert witness in cases involving the valuation of work in the home, sex discrimination, and sexual harassment.

Myra holds a BS degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University, an MA in economics from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

Myra is married to Dr. Jay Jackman. She also has one ex-husband, two grown children, three grown step- children, one son-in-law, three daughters-in-law, and six grandchildren.

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 broke open the traditional publishing/ self-publishing dichotomy in this conversation, having the most exciting discussion on platform building, purpose, marketing and creativity that maybe we’ve ever had. Nina straddles traditional publishing and self-publishing, doing well in both. Here, we really dig into those worlds and where they meet, where they part, and how they can work together. Nina showed us how to pitch fiction and non-fiction, what it really means to build reach and visibility as an author, and how to get inspired to do it. We even put her on the spot by getting her to pitch her novel-in-progress to us, which she did beautifully. And she gives us her top advice for authors, regarding changing your attitude and embracing all aspects of a writing life. Don’t miss this episode!

Her forthcoming book Creative Visualization for Writers: An Interactive Guide to Life

How to Blog a Book

Create a Winning Pitch

The Author Training Manual

Fuse Literary

San Francisco Writers Conference

Ninaamir.com

http://BooksByNinaAmir.com

Nina Amir is a nine-time Amazon bestselling author of 17 titles, including How to Blog a Book and The Author Training Manual.  She helps aspiring authors impact the world as writers, bloggers, authorpreneurs, and blogpreneurs. Her clients have sold 300,000+ copies of their books, landed deals with major publishing houses, and created thriving businesses from their books. She founded National Nonfiction Writing Month. Six of her books were on the Amazon Top 100 list simultaneously.

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.