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Gilmore Girls Saved My Day
Excuse number twenty-seven as to why I’m writing this Tuesday morning instead of having it done earlier: Yesterday was the worst day I’ve had in a long time. I woke up with a headache, but I still went to work and tried to get stuff done.
3 Stupid (or Not So Stupid) Story Mistakes
It seems like so long ago that I was just learning about stories. I’d been writing non-fiction for many years, but when I tried to go into fiction, I quickly discovered that I didn’t know what I was doing. I could write the words, but I couldn’t weave the story. I churned out some pretty bad stuff back then, most of which I’d like to forget. In the time that followed, I soaked in stories. I read, I watched, I analyzed. I was desperate to understand not only what authors were doing but why it worked, or didn’t work.
March of the Penguins, and Why Should I Care?
I don’t know what made me thought March of the Penguins was going to have a great story. No matter what a penguin’s life is like, there was something about the ads that made me think I was going to care what happened to these penguins. I didn’t think it was going to be just a documentary. Actually, I’ve seen documentaries that do the story thing better.
Spotlight: Gilmore Girls
Gilmore Girls | podcast | reviews | spotlight | television | tv & movies
When a friend of mine found out I liked Gilmore Girls, he said, “Really? What’s it about? It’s just a mother and daughter, right?” How does that represent what’s probably the best dramatic series on TV right now? Isn’t that like saying, “The Godfather is just another movie about organized crime”?
The Secret to Naming Characters
This is something that pops up from time to time on the writing boards: How do you choose names for your characters? Writers are desperate for a magic formula, a secret for coming up with perfect charcter names. Well, I have it.
How Not to Run an Online Bookstore
writing
Not directly related to stories, except that it is an engaging one. I’ve been enjoying Paula Berinstein’s story, over at The Writing Show of how she and her husband opened an on-line bookstore, invested time and money, went out of business. I love small-business stories, and this one offers a different view of the book industry. I previously posted concerning the first two parts of this story. Paula B. has now posted part 3:
-TimK
The Power of Your Personal Story
One of the most successful blogs in the blogosphere owes its success to a great story. I’m referring to Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog, which has grown over the past year from 86,000 visitors in February 2005 to a projected 715,000 this month. That’s almost 10 times. Google ads on the site, however, earn almost 100 times what they did last February: $53 compared to $4,700 this month.
What’s Steve’s secret? (Read more…)
The Telling of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of the most endearing pieces of classic literature. Of the many literary novels extant, this is one of the ones that we actually want to read. Why is that? And what do we have to do to make our stories as endearing as Mark Twain did?
Spotlight: Storyteller (Review)
A review of Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop by Kate Wilhelm
Tell me a story. Tell me a story about telling stories. Tell me about before there was the Internet, and people wrote with heavy machines that went clunk-clunk, and they wrote their dreams on paper, and then the papers got burned up. And then they started again and became famous.
Well, what you want to hear is Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop by Kate Wilhelm.
