Monday Motivation

I want to talk today about the remarkable properties of glue when it comes to assembling story. You remember what E.M. Foster said about the difference between story and life? The king died and [...]

This is not a puff-piece. It’s rather a salute to the sort of commitment to the craft of writing that we could all learn from. It’s inspired by one of our students, half-way through our online [...]

One of the most succinct definitions of art that I’ve ever come across is this: Art is repetition with variation. After all, there’s no real conceptual difference between Michaelangelo’s David, [...]

Let me make a quite unremarkable observation that writing a story is, in its own right, a Hero’s Journey. Join me as I trace the Writer’s Journey over the course of composing a story… The writer, [...]

Primer is a little movie that was made (and written, and edited and starred in) by a guy called Shane Carruth. It’s one of those legendary stories that buzz around the film industry for years: a [...]

It’s called “argument by authority” and all the best rhetoricians frown on it. A bad argument, they say, is not improved by quoting an authoritative voice in support of it. A good buttress, you [...]

A guy called Scott Myers runs a very nifty blog on writing for the big screen. He calls it Go Into The Story, and every day he posts advice about screenwriting, interviews with screen writers, [...]

Here’s another lesson from No Country for Old Men… When last we spoke (!) I described Lewellyn Moss’s flight from the implacable hand of Fate, Anton Chigurh. He eventually shakes off his pursuer [...]

In the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, the protagonist, Lewellyn Moss, is a hunter who comes across evidence of a drug deal gone wrong in the desert. He finds an attaché case full of money [...]

With a colleague, I’ve been devising a fairly complex story, running over ten or so years, featuring the adventures of a young man as he transitions from childhood, through adolescence into young [...]

Why is the point of view you choose to write in so critical to the effects you wish to create in your narrative? The writer’s job, as I’ve said before, is to create characters and a world in such [...]

I’m going to get to my subject today in a roundabout way, if you don’t mind. Sometimes the route you take to your destination is as interesting as the destination. My step-daughter’s about to [...]