I have a couple of guy friends who live together who are Star Wars fans. Calling them fans is actually an understatement.
The Star Wars canon follows the theme of last week with a truckload of characters. But what happens when you take the complete opposite approach, and pare down your cast of characters to one person?
Earlier this week, my dad asked me for feedback on a story he wrote. The story is about a father figure who turned out to be something of a con man. Memoir is often boring, but this story was amazing, stranger than fiction.
You could also tell the story was written by an amateur. My dad is a good storyteller, but telling a story to a few people at a party and writing professionally are two very different things.
What’s the difference between pro and amateur writing? How can you write a story as good as any professional writer?
In an effort to win the heart of Zelda Sayre, F. Scott Fitzgerald finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, at age twenty-three. Truman Capote caught the attention of Random House publishing with his story Miriam, just shy of his twenty-first birthday. When Ernest Hemingway was twenty-six he wrote The Sun Also Rises, and Mary Shelley completed the manuscript for Frankenstein at nineteen. Perhaps it’s just my own insecurities leaving me feeling rather inadequate with this knowledge, but I suspect I’m not alone.
Many of our favorite stories have an item that our heroes are attempting to retrieve. Sometimes that item has significance to the plot, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the titular lost ark ends up getting Indiana Jones out of a precarious situation. And sometimes the item is just an item that the heroes need to find because, well, something needs to run the plot of this thing.
In that case, the item is called a MacGuffin.
Today, I’m thrilled to be talking to Seth Godin, bestselling author of Permission Marketing, Tribes, and many others. Forbes calls Seth a “demigod on the web,” and when I’m feeling uninspired and creatively drained, I often read through Seth’s blog and come away feeling refreshed and ready to create.
Seth Godin’s most recent book, The Icarus Project, is a dare to make art and share it with the world. I personally found The Icarus Project a challenge to finish because I got so many new ideas for how to approach my writing that I had trouble sitting still to read.
Enjoy the interview!
Earlier this week, we discussed framing devices, and how they can determine whatever a past-tense, first-person narrator can die or not. Today, we conclude with the other factors: time frames, and the broadcasting theory.
