In this episode, Angie and Elizabeth answer a listener’s question about how to use poetic language to story's advantage rather than distraction. This requires teasing apart what, exactly, poetic language entails--compression, metaphor, white space, senstae detail--and what prose writers can gain from the poetic. Focusing on poetry’s clarifying power rather than a sense of it as obscuring, they ask: what are your artistic goals, and can you go deeper to get clearer? They delve into story, character, and setting as metaphor , and emphasize the importance of letting your intentional choices as a writer guide your response to a note about, for example, the poetry in your language. By noticing that one of the thing art does sometimes is to shock and bother us, the conversation swings through a look at imagery in film and the history of different movements in film. In short: There is no book everyone likes. Find the people who understand what you are trying to do. Make sure you are one of them. Do what you love. And keep trying!

Links in this episode:

Yu Yun-Li

Ann Carson

Bernardine Evaristo Girl, Woman, Other 

Rachel Getting Married 

Birdman

Russian Ark 

John Ashbery

Julianna Spahr

Jeanette Winterson The Passion

Sundance

Film: Coming Home in the Dark

Books about Henry James:

The Master by Colm Toibin

Author, Author David Lodge

Guy du Maurier

Tim Ferriss books Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice and Tools of Titans

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.

Happy New Year! Angie and Elizabeth follow their “what are you working on” opening into a deep dive into the art and systems of submitting your work to literary journals, as Elizabeth has begun to do. This includes learning the markets, curating your own backlog, rejection, and representing a writer who is not as good as you are now--the you who wrote your finished work. They touch on the importance of quantity over quality for certain goals. And in “Steal This,” Angie explains how we can use math explorations to open our minds to multiple ways of illustrating information, opening to all the tools possible for a given problem.

Links in this episode:

Tiny Love Story

Submittable

Rankings of 500 Lit Mags

Lea Page podcast

Stockard Channing reading the Ramona the Pest books

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.

With Elizabeth fresh off virtual Sonoma County Writers Camp, she and Angie discuss the technological opportunities of this moment and how it will carry into the future. This evolves into a consideration of the advantages of dictation and whether typing will turn out to be a brief technological phase. Angie doesn’t fall in love easily with books and, though she teaches story development based on screenwriting, the books she is drawn to tend to be quirky. She particularly appreciates narrators who accept the strange terms of their world. And the metaphoric resonances of that strange element. After a detour into an appreciation for amazing audiobook narrators and public libraries, the discussion advances the “one unbelievable thing” theory of near realism, looking at why it works to break one--and only one--rule and make everything believable.

Links in this episode:

Gil Dennis video

Leonora Carrington The Hearing Trumpet 

Kevin Wilson Nothing to See Here 

Stockard Channing reading Ramona the Pest series 

Ruth O. Saxton The Book of Old Ladies: Celebrating Women of a Certain Age in Fiction

Jennifer March Soloway

Muriel Sparks Momento Mori 

Tana French The Searcher

Meg LeFauve

Martin Seligman Authentic Happiness

Josh Spector For the Interested newsletter

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.

Yay, you voted! And look, it worked. Now buy books from your local indie bookstore. In today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth talk about voice and POV, including the theatrical element of voice, leaning into voice, and when analysis should kick voice into gear. They also talk about the differences between who we hoped we’d be and who we are, the impact of the kids being home all the time, and whether and when self-compassion can be a winning or worthwhile strategy. A debate on self-compassion v. pushing and deadlines concludes with the question of whether deadlines might be a form of self-compassion. Other techniques to get and keep you going: excitement about the work itself, the effort and possibility of making the world a better place. Other topics include omniscient first person, white-guy eighties authors, “characterness,” the storyteller in voice, voice in film and film-equivalents to voice, shameful obsessions (that don’t hurt people) and letting yourself embrace your own shameful(but joy harmful) obsessions...and journeys.

Links in this episode:  

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Nick Flynn

Writers on Writing Nick Flynn interview

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 

Remains of the Day, book and movie

Thor: Love and Thunder 2022

Everything Tiaka Watiti including TED talk

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Little Mutinies short

Conviction by Denise Mina

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand

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.

Today’s podcast mines for what we can learn about the moments we falter--as when Angie and Elizabeth stopped podcasting for a few weeks. The conversation wonders,

Who has more free time right now? And briefly explores revision—how do you know what’s needed when you already know the story so well. But mostly this is an episode about connection, permission, productivity, isolation, and meaning. Writing as activism, and life as performance art. If you feel like you are walking through knee-deep mud, maybe holding your breath, we hope this chat will help.

Links in this episode:  

AnnieDillard

Thich Nhat Hanh

Pomodoro

Zadie Smith essays 

Robert Frost

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.