Story Makers Show

Nicholas P. Taylor has an alias. The acclaimed author of two historical novels, Nick took up with mysteries under the name T.T. Monday. The second, Double Switch, was recently released, and we tracked him down to talk genre switching, research, the two plots you have to know, the art of the quick and dirty timeline, and the differences between a thriller and a mystery. We touched on the psychology of hyper-masculinity, character development and wish fulfillment, and of course, because we pride ourselves on our craft-focused but far-ranging conversations, sentient animals and communicative fungi. You’ll learn how fiction differs from life and why it should, the process of plotting a detective novel, and its difference from writing literary fiction, some rules for writing series, the necessity of throwing away pages and drafts, following character v following story, the importance of voice, and who was the first published author in California. Plus more, much more. Links Discussed:

The Confessions of Nat Turner

How to Write Killer Fiction

The Portable Veblen

Midnight Cowboy (Film)

A.S. Byatt

Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald 

Batman

Lauren Groff

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart A Film About Wilco by Sam Jones

T.T. Monday is the pseudonym of novelist Nick Taylor, author of The Disagreement (2008) and Father Junípero's Confessor (2013). Double Switch (2016) is the second novel to feature the Johnny Adcock, following The Setup Man (2014). He lives in California.

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.

What of the storyteller who stands before a live audience, to entrance, to entertain, to warn, to engage? What can we learn from the most ancient form of story making? Today we talk with acclaimed storyteller--and former psychotherapist--Hari Meyers about the art, archetypes and activism of the storyteller. In his latest project, Hari is resurrecting the reference for the goddess Isis away from the terrorist organization. We dig into archetypal understandings of character and mythical structure, the ways to tell psychological propaganda from a particular time versus deeper internal question in a story, and the necessity of exhausting a character’s flaws as you move toward empathy. The thrill of live theater, the amplification provided by a large audience, the purposes of story and even the failings of Freud as storyteller come under our examination in this far ranging conversation that gets to the ur-art under all story making: live myth telling.

Links Discussed:

Joseph Campbell

King David and the story of David and Goliath

Medea the play 

Oedipus by Sophocles

Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama/ The Gospel at Colonus 

Johan Sebastian Bach

Walt Whitman

Tony Zhou video essays

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 Angie interviewed Elizabeth, just to get really meta or, you know, narcissistic. Actually, we thought this would be a good way to introduce us to our listeners: Who are these people asking these questions? Why are they so hungry to know everything about story? Angie pulls out her hardball questions and we dig how to make writing as high a priority as any other kind of work even though it's not usually as lucrative, the tremendous freedom of writing badly, vulnerability, and what meditating and writing have in common. We talk about the importance of story and ways to find it, including extremism, bad behavior, flaws and the dangerous project of staying alive. We ponder whether a writer’s greatest fear is always also her greatest desire, and how intuition and fascination will fuel your writing. A little bit of life story, from pre-teen busking to years of morning pages, comes into play. And we end of talking a lot about Stephen King.

Links

Podcast Guest Nina Schuyler

Jessica Hinds

Ethan Canin

Bob Shacochis

"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin

Writing Short Screenplays That Connect

Elizabeth Stark is co-host of the podcast Story Makers Show (http://StoryMakersShow.com), the author of the novel Shy Girl (FSG, Seal Press) and co-director and co-writer of several short films, including Little Mutinies, and a creative documentary FtF: Female to Femme (both distributed by Frameline). She earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing. Take classes from her at http://BookWritingWorld.com. Elizabeth has also taught writing and literature at UCSC, Pratt Institute, the Peralta Colleges and Hobart & William Smith Colleges and was the Distinguished Fiction Writer at St. Mary’s College in 2010. Her writing has recently appeared in The Rumpus and she presented at the San Francisco Writers Conference in 2016. She’ll be launching the Sonoma Country Writers Camp this summer.

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 this honest conversation with Meredith Maran, prolific memoirist, book reviewer, novelist and editor of the newly released Why We Write About Ourselves, we dive into the risks of writing a memoir whose story you are still living. Meredith gives us her excellent test for “memoirability”--how to tell if your story should be a memoir. Having just interviewed 20 top memoirists publishing today and now under contract and deadline for her own next memoir, Meredith is uniquely poised to talk about the challenges, rewards and necessary tests and tips for the genre. She also tells us how she “cheated on her agent” to pitch the book to an editor while the agent was out of town, and the key information she learned about whether to make her memoir humorous with touches of poignancy or poignant with traces of humor. Find out how Facebook and iCal served her writing process. Get crucial insight into a book reviewer's perspective on publicity, the publishing world, the fate of a book and the future of freelance.

Books and links discussed:

Meredith Maran

Meredith’s Review of recent podcast guest Paul Lisicky’s memoir, The Narrow Door

Novelist Susan Sherman (her writing partner)

Counterpoint Press

Dan Smetanka, editor at Counterpoint

Olivia de Havilland

Abigail Thomas

Jennifer Egan

Kathryn Harrison 

Victor Frankel Institute

A.M. Holmes

Anne Lamott

Meredith Maran published her first poem in Highlights For Kids at age 6, her first national magazine article at age 15, and her first book at age 18. In the years that followed she built a house and raised goats outside Taos, installed brakes on the Ford assembly line in San Jose, and wrote an exposé of right-wing fundamentalism in Silicon Valley while working as a technical writer at National Semiconductor. After serving as Editor of the Banana Republic Catalogue (when Banana Republic was still cool), she created award-winning marketing campaigns for socially responsible businesses including Ben & Jerry's, Working Assets, Stonyfield Farm, Smith & Hawken, and Odwalla.

Meredith has been a keynote speaker at venues including the SNAP Conference, the California Writer's Club, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Charles Schwab Foundation, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Educators for Social Responsibility, and the Education Writers of America. She’s been Writer in Residence at UCLA and at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, and a fellow at MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mesa Refuge, and Ragdale.

She lives in Silver Lake, Los Angeles.

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.

What does it feel like to be an overnight success after 17 years of publishing? In our lovely conversation with novelist, memoirist and essayist Paul Lisicky, we discuss the benefit of low expectations and the liberation of not worrying about having a huge audience followed by the surprise of getting one with his new memoir, The Narrow Door. We look at the role of discouragement in shaping a life/ life story, what it’s like to be writing the book while the story is still unfolding, inhabiting each moment of a narrative with feeling and intelligence, questions of perspective and time, and decisions around anonymity and using names. Paul talks shop: the process of placing work in journals and lit mags, submissions, and a surprising thought about online vs print publications. Writing while walking seems to be a theme in the Story Maker podcasts, and it comes up in a fun way here. This rich and winding conversation also covers boredom, randomness, the importance of paying attention to the way your mind works.

Links

Paul Lisicky

Home for the Holidays (movie)

Loorie Moore

Virginia Woolf

Paul Lisicky is the author of five books: Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, Unbuilt Projects, and now The Narrow Door, a memoir named one of BuzzFeed’s “27 Most Exciting New Books of 2016.” His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, Ecotone, Fence, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, Unstuck, and in many other magazines and anthologies. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Fellow. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Rutgers-Newark, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, the low residency program at Sierra Nevada College, and at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He is the editor of StoryQuarterly and serves on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

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.

What do you get when you cross a novelist and a screenplay writer? An 80 page outline of a movie! Author Jacqueline Luckett always dreamed of her book being turned into a movie, and now a known actress has bought the screenplay. Jackie went back to school for an MFA in visual storytelling so she could adapt the book for film herself--to great success. Learn about how that changed her relationship to structure, and the comparisons she makes between several forms. We also talk about how to decide which projects to work on, the value of thinking about your characters and your story even when you're not yet writing, and the benefits both of testing out other processes and of sticking to the ones that work for you. There’s a great exploration of subtext here, and some terrific advice about writing, MFAs and asking for what you want. Favorite line? "It's only fear; you got to conquer it."

Books and links Discussed:

Jacqueline Luckett

August Wilson

Janet Burroway

Charles Baxter

Terry McMillan

In 1999 Jacqueline Luckett left the corporate world to kickstart her writing career with classes she took on a dare—from herself.

People Magazine (February 2012) described Luckett’s sophomore novel, Passing Love as “beautifully written and filled with vibrant scenes of Paris in its Jazz Age and today.”

Essence Magazine selected Searching for Tina Turner as the January 2010 book-of-the-month selection. The novel follows a divorced woman’s journey to self by way of France. What comes through for the main character is the inspiration of Tina Turner’s personal story: everything we need to move forward in our lives is already within us.

Reinvention, self-awareness, and self-fulfillment are themes throughout Luckett’s novels. She strives to write compelling and interesting stories while addressing fear and what can be done to conquer it. “We can all afford to be fearful, but we can't let fear keep us from doing what we want or need to do.”

Luckett refuses to be boxed into categories that limit her drawing power. “My novels have universal appeal—both in story and character,” Luckett says. “Personally, I'll follow a story that makes me look at the world with a perspective different from my own. In both Passing Love and Searching for Tina Turner the main character could be you, your best friend, a co-worker, or the mother of your child's classmate. I write about women, of a “certain age,” who've had failures and successes in their lives and are looking to move forward regardless of age. ”

Luckett encourages her readers to avoid deferring their dreams: “The length of time it takes to get to the dream is not as important as fulfilling the dream.”

Jacqueline, a native Californian, lives and writes in Oakland, but takes time out to indulge her love of traveling and to nurture her passion for photography and exotic foods.

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.

What do animal tracking and writing have in common? More than you think, as we learn in conversation with Sylvia Lindsteadt, a prolific young author of fiction and non-fiction and a certified animal tracker. We discussed the value of mimicking natural cycles, the importance of place and even the ways setting can have an arc, and the necessity both to show up and get out of your own way as a writer. She also tells us some amazing techniques for creating real life assignments and deadlines--including monthly fairy tales she wrote and sent by mail to subscribers, and more. Our topics range from the changing landscape of publishing, new approaches to crowdsourcing inside legitimate publishing and the symbiotic way to get an agent, to exceptional moments of inspiration, collaboration with an artist and broadening story to include the more than human world as actual characters. Cna writing save the world? Sylvia makes a compelling case for the urgent need to change our stories about other creatures so that we can change the state of eminent disaster of the world because we are story-made creatures.

Links

Sylvialinsteadt.com

Rima Staines

Jay Griffiths

HeyDay Books and Malcolm Margolin

Welcome to Me ( Film with Kristen Wiig)

Unbound.co.uk to preorder Tatterdemalion

Sylvia Victor Linsteadt is a writer, artist, and certified animal tracker. Her work—both fiction and non-fiction—explores the tenets of deep ecology and wild myth, and is devoted to radically transforming and broadening our human stories to include the voices, perspectives and dreams of the more-than-human world.

Her books include Tatterdemalion, (Unbound, forthcoming 2016/2017), The Wonderments of the East Bay (Heyday 2014), and The Lost Worlds of the Bay Area (Heyday, Forthcoming 2017). Her short fiction has been published in New California Writing 2013, Dark Mountain, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Golden Key  and Deathless Press. She has a regular column with Earthlines Magazine, and her creative nonfiction can also be found in Poecology, Dark Mountain, and News from Native California.

Sylvia’s story “The Midwife of Temescal” won the James D. Phelan Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation in Fall 2014. She has an Honors B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University.mpshire.

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.

Have things gotten worse for mothers who want the time to write? Former non-fiction editor at Literary Mama, now SF Grotto-ite, solo performer, writer, host of a yearly contemplative creative retreat at Santa Sabina and more, talks about the prohibitions against mothers leaving their children for extended writing retreats, the challenges and process of fielding submissions, time management, juggling projects, navigating Medium. She studied solo performance with W. Kamu Bell and has written non-fiction and fiction for magazines and anthologies--so she has plenty to say about writing for the page v. the stage. Get tips on organizing your material, secrets of recording your own audio book, and the strategy of braiding your stories. With insights into a walking and writing practice, and good ways to talk about work that is still tender in workshops, this is an episode you won’t want to miss!

Links Discussed:

@TheSusanIto on Medium and Twitter,

@SusanIto on Instagram, Facebook

http://www.susanito.com/

The Mouse Room on Audible.com

The Critical Response Process book

The Grotto

Santa Sabina Center 

Solo Performance Workshop

A Question of Balance: Artists & Writers on Motherhood 

Lisa Marie Rollins/ Solo House

W. Kamau Bell/ United Shades of America

Zahra Noorbakhsh

Sizzling Story Outlines by H. R. D’Costa

Brian Stanton "Blank"

Camera Words (on Medium)

Podcast Good Muslim Bad Muslim

Robin Coste Lewis

Santa Sabina Center

Hedgebrook

Critical Response Process by Liz Lerman

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.

Janet Harvey brings together savvy from advertising and invests it in indie filmmaking and comic books--and she told us the key to a successful Kickstarter campaign. She also talked about the scripting process for these mediums as well as gaming and adaptations, and offered up the challenge she gave herself and the reasoning behind it: to write a script with no dialog at all. Plus the Wild West frontier element of newer genres compared to the stringent rules of mainstream screenwriting. This is an interesting moment for women and comics, Janet claims, and gives us a sneak peak at the comic she’ll be announcing in early Spring. We delve into collaboration, compromise and creativity. She admits what she wishes she’d done differently in the newly completed production of her indie feature film, Screen Queen, and tells us some of the crazy true-life stories that inspired it. We touch on new distribution models and ways to monetize a movie now. Our conversation goes the gamut from bullying to the Austin independent film scene to the power of deep focus, frames and color. Inspiring!

Links

www.janetharvey.net

https://www.facebook.com/SCENEQUEEN/

http://www.scenequeenmovie.com/

https://twitter.com/scenequeenmovie

Zynga

Tomb Raider

Yotsuba (manga series)

DC comics

James Schamus

Alan Moore

Comic Book Script Archive

 Tangerine 

 Carol 

Phyllis Nagy Screenwriter of Carol

Beasts of No Nation 

Cary Fukanaga 

Creed

Digital Bolex Grants for Women Cinematographers

 The Austin Film Society

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Janet Harvey received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She won the LA Short Film Award for her first script, THE GUITAR PLAYER'S GIRLFRIEND, which included a production package from Kodak and Panavision. Her short films have played at festivals around the world, sold at Cannes, and won awards, including honors from Colin Vaines at the Weinstein Company. She has written comic books for DC Comics and Image Comics. She recently completed her first feature, SCENE QUEEN. Her comic book series ANGEL CITY is due out from Oni Press in 2017.

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.

Diane Fraser had a remarkable niece, predicted to die in her first week of life who lived through 40 surgeries and more brushes with death but also through wild adventures, seductions and transformations, for almost three decades. Eulogizing this heroic young person lead Diane to write Growing Up Superheros, a memoir. In our conversation we talk about researching a personal story, including use of interviews and journaling, looking for common themes to focus the book, grappling with the boundaries between truth and imagined detail, and respecting the privacy of the other “characters” in the book. We also dig into magical realism and omniscient narration in a memoir, the entrepreneurial aspects of being a self published writer, and representations of disabled folks in romantic relationships. Tips on crowdfunding, sustaining a writing group, collaborating with an illustrator and more.

Link

http://Growingupsuperheroes.com

Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown

Anais Nin

Diane Fraser is a writer who lives in a world where symbols, archetypes, and spirits are alive and communicate with her directly. Diane won several poetry prizes in college at UMass Boston, where she got her B.A. in English with Honors in Creative Writing. As an undergrad, she was a Stadler Semester for Young Poets fellow at Bucknell University. After college, she was a founding member of a small writing group, Erograph, who wrote together for 12 years, and did readings in Boston and Pennsylvania. Previous publishing includes poems published years ago in the Boston Phoenix, Arts Media, and small press literary journals.

To further her mystical experience and self-mastery Diane studied with three teachers in the shamanic and hermetic arts. As part of her personal work she teaches informally, helps people with their lives through energy work, tarot, and insight, and publishes a blog. While working full time on national behavioral health projects, Diane has developed her scientific knowledge on addiction, recovery, and mental health. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts. This is her first book.

Diane is available to meet with your book group when they read Growing Up Superheroes, either in person in the Greater Boston area, or via Skype. "Thank you so much for joining us at our book group meeting last night. It was really wonderful to meet the author behind this book we all loved so much and to learn about your writing process and more about Deihlia. We all loved the discussion and had a great time getting to know you." -AS

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.