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.

Angie teaches math and daydreams a new film while Elizabeth gets a mammogram and considers character questions. In today’s episode, Elizabeth explores the epiphany she began to have on last week’s episode by asking Angie a lot of questions about balancing or toggling between chaos, intuition, planning, and structure. What is the relationship of character to action in a discovery draft and beyond? Is what we love about a discovery draft what means we can throw it away? Discovery v drafting. In responding, Angie explores her childhood boredom during chores that sparked her earliest fan fiction. They discuss how structure gives you a way to reapproach a vast and layered project like a book or screenplay. How to zero in on character and story. And the ways that list-making story development can create the magical discovery experience as well as blind drafting can. The planning process also brings in an element of focus that can be helpful to those who lack this. An outline can be incredibly vivid. Intuitive outlining can also get you through cliche ideas, dig deeper. They also touch on iterations in screenplays versus novels and the role the reader plays in co-creating a story. Angie talks about her experience translating a screenplay into a novel. Other topics include the value of time off between iterations, of simplifying and of fighting for windows of focus. Finally, Tony Robbins provides a window into emotional state when he cites a study that proves the power of sensate detail in creating emotion.

Links in this episode:

36 Love Questions

David Mamet’s 3 Scene Questions 

Gill Dennis Questions 

Matthew Salesses Craft in the Real World

Lajos Egri The Craft of Dramatic Writing (premise)

Cal Newport Deep Work

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.

In this week’s episode, a listener asks a question about transitions and pacing, leading to a roving discussion of pacing, logistics, linearity, causality, and intentionality: what is significant—and how do you know? Creating the reader’s experience through character work in both writing and editing, and then trusting character to emerge through necessary scenes allows for the shaping of meaningful transition. Angie and Elizabeth compare and contrast their mothers’ carrot chopping methodologies to demonstrate how character comes through all actions. Other topics include scenes lists, transitions in screenplays versus prose, character expectations, jumpcuts, moments of change, grocery shopping, not working, and quantity versus quality in submissions as in all things, at certain times.

Links in this episode:

The Op-Ed Project

Devi S Laskar on Story Makers Show: Taking It Day by Day 

Katie Orenstein 

Lily King Writers & Lovers

AS Byatt

Josh Spector’s notes on Seth Godwin’s book

The Practice by Seth Godin

Fried Green Tomatoes film

Call My Agent

The Danish Girl and The Nineteenth Wife by David Ebershoff

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.

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.