Lea Page is a wonderful writer and long-time Book Writing World student whose first book--Parenting in the Here and Now: Realizing the Strengths You Already Have--was recently published by Floris Press. She has also written two moving and evocative memoirs. In our conversation, we discuss juggling writing projects and developing a daily writing practice. Lea, who has placed many short pieces for publication, shares great insights about the benefits of the submission process (besides occasional publication) as well as how to persist, cheer rejection, and succeed! We covered resistance, inspiration v. planning, and some structure questions you can ask yourself. Finally, we looked at finding your beginning and your ending in memoir, the power of story and how to think about memoir as taking steps on your arc. We learned a lot from this promising and disciplined writer.

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Links Discussed:

Creative Writing Opportunities Group List: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CRWROPPS-B/info

Joan Gelfand, submissions coach: http://www.joangelfand.com/

Find Lea, her blog and her parenting book at: http://www.leapageauthor.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.

Mary is a master of many forms, and we discuss and compare writing screenplays, poetry and novels. She tells us about compartmentalization, visual plot and character. In film, Mary says, character is demonstrated by what you do in difficult circumstances when you are given a choice.  Mary is a retired professor, and we get into day jobs and PhDs. On the other hand, we also delve into liminal states, transcendental meditation and that article in the New Yorker about psychadelics. Does writing require an altered state and how do we get there? Robert Olen Butler talks about the “Dream State” for writing. Mary writes across many genres and has written for many decades. We discuss science fiction, feminism, the role of reading in writing, and  editing: ruthless cutting, reading aloud, motivation, evoking world and more.

Books Discussed

Travelers with No Ticket Home

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Remembrance of Things Past by Proust

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Station Eleven

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From Where You Dream by River Olen Butler

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Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

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Time and Again by Jack Finney

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From Time to Time by Jack Finney

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The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

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Links
Inception
Renee de Palma co-writer and filmmaker
Mary's web site resources, interview series and newsletter

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.

Talking with Meliza Banales is like riding some amazing, brightly-colored roller coaster through the church of creativity. What? She’s just inspiring, whether she’s talking about reframing the promotion process as part of the creative process, being willing to fail, living with lupus as a writer, or launching her new novel into the world.

She gave us terrific tips on using separate spaces to juggle different aspects of writing, and she never forgot that everyone doesn’t have the luxury of living alone. She talked about committing to your writing (“Give it what it needs or walk away”), getting help, going on art dates with yourself, and reading your work in public as you go. About this last, she really urged writers to pitch your work to the street and stay current with your readers. This might reflect her status as a former Poetry Slam champion. Poetry Slam is a boot camp for writers: “It’s all about telling a story and you only have three minutes to do it.” Drawing on her filmmaking experience, she looked at the practice of writing in pieces the way filmmakers shoot films and then building the plot and the sequence with the time frame around the core concept.

Reading, she reminded us, is integral to being a writer. She urged us to look at books “as a refuge rather than work.

Some of the books and authors we discussed:

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Paula by Isabel Allende

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

To Show and to Tell by Philip Lopate

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Charles Bukowski

Lynn Breedlove

We also talked about:

Chicana feminism

punk rock chick coming of age

character growth

inherent conflict

writing as refuge

Find Meliza at missyfuego.com, get her novel, Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific and her chapbook, You Smell Like Danger, 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.

Rhona Berens is a life coach extraordinaire. We should know--we’ve worked with her, as have many “creatives.” She’s also got a background in film, screenwriting and writing for television, and writes poetry and other forms as well--so she was the perfect guest for Story Makers. She laid out some key ideas about prioritization, and explained “saboteurs”--the parts of ourselves that bring voices of fear and judgement into our lives and art--and how to work with them. We discussed how to make your intuitive a voice as powerful and heard as the voices of your fear and negative consequences. Listening to the voice that says, “I’ve got a story to tell” and some tools to support that voice to thrive. At the end of the episode we touched on subtext. If you are ready to transform your relationship to your creativity, your writing, your story making, or the necessary self-promotion, this is the episode for you.

Links and Books Discussed:
How to Be Both by Allie Smith

Puffy Chair, a film by the Duplass brothers

Einstein's Cosmos

Rhona's website is http://www.fortedreams.com/

Link to article by Rhona about how to remove some roadblocks to promoting ourselves as writers: http://bit.ly/1MRnHQv

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 wonderfully named Indigo Moore is three artists in one--at least. He’s a poet and a playwright who is now writing the screenplay for a play that was optioned for film. (Not to mention that he’s got a high-tech day job we talk about a little bit.) He’s also an editor--and we were sure to get that perspective on submission and what he learned as a writer from editing.When we caught up with him, he was also writing a new play on commission, and we talked about having that kind of external deadline, the art of submitting, as well as the different mindsets required for different genres. He described playwriting as a language-driven medium, as compared to the image-driven medium of poetry. In addition to laying out the process of calling or stripping a poem, he gave us a terrific description of a scene that you might see in a novel and how it would be written for a play and then how to make that same scene imagistic and wordless in a screenplay. Since writing is rewriting, we also looked at revision in different genres. We also got into following the character and trusting the process. He urged us to hunting inspiration down with a stick rather than sitting around and waiting for it.

Books/ Authors/ Artists/ Screenplays Discussed:

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Henry Dumas
Desiree Cooper
Jimi Hendrix
Paul Robeson
The Pulp Fiction screenplay

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.