Writing

You are currently browsing the archive for the Writing category.

When the Audience Reacts

January 29, 2013 in Quotable, Writing | No comments

I think this is true of writing too. You never know what in your work will resonate with people. You have to write what feels true to you (meaning what you are passionate about), send it out into the world, and not worry about the reaction. The reaction belongs to the readers.

When I tell a story—when I do anything onstage—it sounds crazy, but I don’t concern myself with the reaction. Because every listener is different, so they’re going to pull something different out of the story. I think a lot of times performers, and storytellers in particular, make the mistake of trying to manipulate their audience’s emotions or reactions. But I think when you tell the story, you tell the truth as much as you can, and it’s up to them what they take away from it.
–Peter Aguero, master storyteller for The Moth

As far as I know, he’s no relation to Sergio Aguero. (A wee bit of English Premier League humor.)

Another great quote from an interview with him you can read here:

Well, your stories are, at a base level, about an emotional truth, and the more I tell stories and hear people’s stories, the more I realize we’re all the same. We think we’re these complicated animals, these special, unique flowers, and we are to a certain extent, but we also all know what it’s like to feel joy, to feel hate, to feel anger, to be sad, to be scared—we all know that. So you tell your story as much as you can at the base emotional truth, and then the two hundred people in the audience are reminded of two hundred stories of when they felt anger, or fear, or utter joy, you know? And that’s why, I think, I tell stories. It’s an amazing exchange of energy, a nonverbal communication that happens…

The “Write What You Know” Fallacy

September 5, 2012 in Writing | No comments

Moss Hart was a playwright and director most famous for his work in the 1930s and 40s and for his autobiography, Act One. Here he writes about his second major attempt to write a play:

I suspected one way I had gone wrong from the start; and forever afterward it made me more than a little leery of those golden nuggets of advice so capriciously tossed out by elder statesman of the theatre to credulous beginners, one of which I must have stumbled across and taken to heart: “Begin by writing of what you know best–do not wander off in fields that are strange to you. Take for your setting and characters only the places and people you know and stick to them.” So went this preposterous bit of dramatic wisdom, thereby discounting the vital and immeasurable quality that imagination gives to all writing, whether it be for the stage or anything else. Since this bit of nonsense had issued from the lips of a quite famous playwright, I had slavishly followed it, writing of a place and people I knew, but completely failing to allow imagination to riffle through the pages as it might have done had I chosen a setting and characters not so highly colored by my own attitudes and prejudices. I had simply set down what I knew best, and stuck to it. The play had verity; what it lacked was the breath of life and imagination–two necessary ingredients for what is usually called creative writing.

Hart wrote this in 1959 yet the “write what you know” conventional wisdom is still around 50+ years later. “Write what you know” is compelling — it sounds like common sense — but I’m with Hart. For the love of the gods, release the hounds of your imagination.

Writing Update

June 6, 2012 in Books, Writing | No comments

I’ve been a bad blogger but the good news is: when I’m not blogging it means I’m writing (usually). Or doing some other writing-related and time-consuming task, like ePublishing, and I feel like doing anything involves a million tiny annoying hurdles. I seem to spend most of my free time jumping these hurdles. You have no idea what I went through just to change the menu bar under the header!

But I found a fix. I have created a new menu bar link above, *ePublishing*, which lists my progress to date with ePublishing. I’m working on a brand new story right now that I’ll be ePublishing soon.

And also, I love me some Transit of Venus!


(Thanks NASA for the pic)

« Older entries