Monthly archives: July 2015


This post features a short film and some bonus material by Redglass Pictures, staring the writer George Saunders, known for his short stories, essays, novellas and children’s books. In the documentary he reveals the pitfalls of bad storytelling and explains the openness and generosity he thinks is required to breath life into […]

George Saunders On Story


On the site here I’m exploiting the surplus of material out there about writing for film and books because at their core, stories are stories! Studying how writers tell them in other mediums is one of the key ways I learned about how to write my own. And being a related […]

Write A Short Anything…


Telling a good story is often about planning, and a great tool I recently heard about is something presented on Out on the Wire, a new story workshop podcast series about making stories, step by step. Cartoonist Jessica Abel & Co break down the principles of storytelling on the show really well, […]

Focus Statements & XY Formulae



In the First post, I said I think Ty’s talk is an excellent crash course in Genre Writing, sometimes cast as lowbrow, but most popular forms of writing these days tend to conform to clear genre tropes, or making a point of hybridizing those for dramatic novelty. There’s nothing intrinsically keeping […]

An aside on Genre vs Literary


Ok, so I think the last two posts on story cover Genre. Genre is like the style of house your want your story to live in. So what goes in the first room of your story? In your story, there are more than just things happening. There are the people they are happening […]

Words of advice on Character