Having trouble getting people to read your story? Do they get five hundred words in only to turn tail and run? Have you tried reading it to them?
This is my advice on home recording. It’s for writers who have done everything they can to get new readers, and are willing to try to get new listeners instead.
This audio blog is about writing through the noise pollution. It’s about turning up the volume in your head to drown everything else out. It’s about keeping track of your ideas through an earthquake.
Once you’re finished listening you can read the second part here:
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When friends on Twitter post photos of mountain-scapes and forest trails, I get scenery envy. I want to unroll a blanket and write beneath their sky. I want to be able to stand up and pace around with my ideas, to take my thoughts for a walk. Continue reading Writing Space (Audio Blog)
As a writer on the internet, I want people to read my work, but I don’t want to lose their attention. That’s why I do audio recordings. My philosophy is this: if I can’t get people to read my stories, then I’ll read my stories to them.
If this is the age of multitasking, then why fight it? People should experience my words the way they want to. On a long road trip, as they chase the horizon. On a woodland trail full of leering shadows. On an elliptical machine, skiing in place.
If you can’t give me your undivided attention, then I’ll take what I can get. Continue reading If You Can’t Make Them Read it, Read it to Them
This piece should do two things:
Help you summarize your story by identifying the elements that audiences look for.
Help you remember each of those elements with a simple memory trick.
The audio component isn’t a podcast, where I discover my statement halfway through making it. It isn’t spoken word poetry either. It’s a guided visualization, set to a beat. It’s fun to listen to, but I invite you to participate. To shape images from your work in progress and place them somewhere in your childhood home.
The memory palace technique takes something your brain has no problem remembering, like spacial relationships, and combines it with something that’s tough to remember, like plot points. Continue reading How to Build a Memory Palace Pitch (Audio Blog)
When I was a kid I threw a Halloween carnival in my parent’s basement. I knew I had the market cornered, because it was the middle of July.
I decided to keep mom and dad in the dark about the project. Investors have a way of meddling with an artist’s vision. I wanted to retain creative control. I was an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs don’t ask for their parents’ permission. Once they saw what a hit it could be, no one would make me apologize for success.
When you send your screenplay to a film producer, they send it to someone like me. I was a script reader, an intern chasing a carrot for an independent film studio.
My job was to summarize your magnum opus into a blurb. To condense your gut wrenching work into a column no larger than an obituary. To turn your hero’s journey into a stroll. To turn your feast for the imagination into an hors d’oeuvres. To take your epic and make it a limerick.
Have you ever tried to write a haiku? Ever try to right one with a three-act structure?
They gave me a pre-formatted template to write all of my coverages in. Much like a Tweet, I only had so many characters to summarize a stack of pages. I had to turn your screenplay into an elevator pitch, a talking trailer, a cinematic stanza. You know when someone says, “Just give me the cliff notes.” That was my job, to turn your rambling prose into a cliff note. Continue reading How to Build a Memory Palace Pitch