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

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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.

Web series and feature films are all about collaboration, and Florencia, who’s been at the helm of both as a writer/ director, goes into the good, the bad, the ugly . . . and the pleasures of that process, from generating ideas and developing characters to co-writing to getting strong readers to working closely with a trusted editor. She gives us some great tips and tools from marinating to using index cards and notebooks to building community, finding a support network and writing your own mission statement. We discussed writing intuitively and taking risks, breaking rules and going against mainstream expectations. Getting honest about struggling with a lack of confidence, this award-winning filmmaker tells us her secret to getting past that, and what she most needs now as an artist of color. Part of her mission is about expanding the conversation around what a woman can be. If you want the nitty gritty about creating the stories you want to see, Florencia shares it here.

Links

 Rialto Cinema

Guinevere Turner

Dyke Central 

Mynah Films

Dyke Central on Facebook

Mira Nair on Yoga 

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.

Nina LaCour just finished her fourth YA novel when we sat down to talk about everything from traumatic grad school workshops to tips for getting an agent to the difference between writing under contract and writing before publication. Nina’s first novel, Hold, was banned in some places and in others assigned by entire high schools. We discussed controversy. “Books are a wonderful place to start conversations,” Nina says. Offering encouragement to write the story you really feel compelled to tell, Nina shared about her year of rejection and her magic week of yes, about writing after becoming a mother, about turning her first novel into a screenplay and then into a film, and what she learned about structure from that experience (including the hilarious litmus test Nina stumbled upon for telling how your scenes are too long). She gave us great tips for writing for a YA audience, including not writing off their experience as less true, including the possible longevity of high school romance. We discussed breaking out of conventions, breaking rules, intuition v structure and pulling short stories out of novels. Nina laid out how she uses questions to drive her story, and gives us juicy, helpful details about her revision process and her writing group. This was a really fun, honest conversation with a wonderful, productive author.
By the way, the quote Elizabeth attributes to Somerset Maugham is in fact this one from E.L. Doctorow, from a Paris Review interview:  “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Here’s the whole interview. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2718/the-art-of-fiction-no-94-e-l-doctorow

LINKS

@nina_lacour

Ninalacour.com

The Checklist Manifesto

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Adele When We were Young lyric: "We were sad of growing old."

Pitch Wars

Victor LaValle

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

WattPad

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 fascinating conversation with journalist and self-published author of a “long piece” on heterosexual, mixed HIV status couples who get pregnant through sex, Positively Negative. Our conversation ranged from the difference between daily newspaper journalism  and narrative, the nut graph, writing every day to what she would do differently if she had her self-published long piece to do over and the unexpected ways it changed the lives of her subjects as well as her career and gave her a “beat.”

We delved into the history of “The New Journalism,” the way journalism has changed and is changing and the return of longform journalism and the way that surprised expectations after the advent of the Internet.

A rousing and inspirational discussion of the business side of writing included loving your work as a way to approach pitching and marketing. Heather offered great advice as a former business coach for writers. She didn’t skirt the challenges of selling stories that have women at the center, and the delicate work of understanding the differences between the maximal story, the minimal story, and the story that's really there. So many tips, from using spreadsheets for timelines to making unlikable characters likable, and much more.

Links and books discussed

@HeatherBoerner for Twitter

www.HIVlovewins.com

Positively Negative on Facebook

Sweet Valley High

John McPhee

Tom Wolfe

Jacqui Banaszynski’s Aids in the Heartland

The Daily Beast

Gilmore Girls

Andrew Solomon Far From The Tree

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Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (first essay in the collection)

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Truman Capote in cold blood

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The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

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Gone Girl

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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.