National Short Film Day
National Short Film Day is December 21. Why short films matter, what the form teaches about compression, and why writers should study storytelling in miniature.
Tag: Storytelling (Page 2)
JanuaryNational Storytelling Week
National Storytelling Week runs late January into February. Why storytelling is the root skill under all writing, and how to actually get better at it.
Book WritingYou Have More Material Than You Think. You Are Just Not Counting It.
Almost everybody who tells me they have no stories tells me three in the next ten minutes. They do not count them because nothing dramatic happened.
GhostwritingA Dancer With a Bone Through Her Nose Taught Me How to Ghostwrite
A bold and wildly creative dancer with a bone through her nose and tattoos that once made my conservative side shudder. We became friends.
GhostwritingBuild the Chapter Around the Story, Not the Other Way Round
A chapter is a building, and most writers treat the story as the paint. The test is removal. Take the story out and see whether the chapter still stands.
NonfictionNonfiction Works Best When It Is Written With Emotion
A thermometer tells you the temperature of a room. It does not tell you whether anybody wants to be in it. Most nonfiction reads like a thermometer.
Fiction WritingThe Unreliable Narrator: How It Works and When to Use It
Few moments in reading match the jolt of realizing your narrator has been lying to you. Done well, it turns a reader into a detective and a straight plot into a labyrinth of doubt. Done badly, it just feels like…
Book WritingHow to Write a Political Book That Inspires Voters
The political books that move elections do not read like policy papers; they read like someone who gets what you are going through and has a plan, the policy wrapped in story, conviction, and direct address. After 54+ books in…
Personal StoryYour Vote Is a Chapter in the Bigger Story
After losing Georgia by 55,000 votes in 2018, Stacey Abrams spent two years telling one story, not about herself, but about 340,000 purged voters. By 2020 the state flipped by 11,779 votes. Policy did not do that; narrative did. Here…
Critical ThinkingWhy Political Books Work Where Arguments Fail
No one ever changed their mind by losing an argument, least of all a political one, where belief is tied to identity and any challenge reads as a personal attack. So both sides dig in and nobody moves. A book…
Character DevelopmentHow to Build Characters That Feel Real
Give them a goal, a flaw, a backstory, send them on a journey, and you get a character with traits instead of a psychology, brave but reckless, wounded childhood that explains it all. They function and stay flat. Real characters…
ChristmasWriting Christmas: How to Capture Holidays on the Page
Christmas is brutally hard to write, because its cultural weight pulls you toward generic warmth, the lights, the cookies, the sentiment every reader has heard a thousand times and feels nothing for. The fix is specificity: not Christmas in general…