In today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth report in their debut trailer camping experience, amd compare it to a creative process. Meanwhile,Angie is doing animation, and Elizabeth gives a submissions update. They turn them to answering a listener’s question about which project to choose, exploring the following approaches:

• Go pitch it to somebody (excitable).
• Ask yourself, Is it big enough to be a book?
• Write a treatment, premise, longline, or outline/ scenelist.
• Be messy.
• Explore whether your multiple projects are in fact connected to each other.
• Put your notes on the wall. Look at them.
• Brainstorm scenes.
• Schedule table reads.
• Read aloud to someone or record yourself or ask someone else to read your work to you… even your computer…
• Work on multiple projects at once…(and the pros and cons of doing so)
• Take time off/ let it sit.

What if, conversely, you have no ideas? Angie and Elizabeth argue about generating ideas by

asking questions that inspire you or letting yourself be impacted by the world.

RIP Beverly Cleary and Larry McMurtry

Links in this episode:

Stockard Channing reading Ramona books audiobook collection

NaNoWriMo

Call My Agent show

Isabel Huppert star

The Office show

The Arsonist’s City by Hala Alyan audiobook

Dear Girls by Ali Wong book

Always Be My Maybe film

Questions? Email questions at storymakersshow.com 

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 episode kicks off with a glance at the trouble with deep work in a pandemic with kids before diving into emotion in story: Emotional arc and emotion as action trigger, emional as both key and causal. It is emotion that drives readers to read, based on desired mood and emotion. There are writer who avoid emotion and the converse trouble of only focusing on emotion, musing, feeling. The discussion affirms the need for both action and emtion, as it examines the challenges of  emotional logic. Other terms and topics include: Thin cuts. Character cuts. Tone. Simplification. Setting. What reveals character accurately. Small telling details reveal character. Focus. Relevance. Snap judgements. Emotion and dialogue. Hard-earned emotional breakthroughs. Fear of sentimentality. (Sentimentality is not the same as earned emotional response.) Drop dive into emotion on today’s show.

Links in this episode:

E.M. Forster Aspect of the Novel

Pilar Alessandra The Coffee Break Screenwriter

Malcolm Gladwell Blink

Carol Wolf 

John Gottman

WandaVision

Jesmyn Ward essay

Grace Paley “Wants” in Emormous Changes at the Last Minute

Shobha Rao Girls Burn Brighter

“And then the murders began”

Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway

Questions? Email questions at storymakersshow.com 

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.