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


Audition


On Writing


Misery


Lolita


Where You Dream


Sonny’s Blues


“The Langoliers”

Podcast Guest Nina Schuyler

Jessica Hinds

Ethan Canin

Bob Shacochis

“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin

Writing Short Screenplays That Connect

 

Elizabeth Stark

Elizabeth Stark

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.