ChatGPT is all over the news these days, and as a creative writer, I was freaked out by it. I got a sick, fearful feeling that ChatGPT will replace human creativity—my creativity. It’s hard enough to find an audience without a tsunami of crap, written instantaneously for free by a robot, crashing over the marketplace …
What if you don’t want to start your story at the beginning? Join Kim Kessler and me for a discussion of stories with nonlinear timelines.
Every scene requires change, and every change must be incited by something that flows from the previous scene. If your character is just coasting along on the momentum of a previous inciting incident, it’s not a new scene, it’s just a scene that needs some cutting.
For someone who’s been writing for five decades, it’s weird that I just learned how.
Let me tell you about first drafts. Well, my first drafts. Or at least this particular first draft. It’s a mess. It feels like a hopeless mess.
I examine the internal roadblocks to completing my draft of the Brokeback Mountain inspired story, and try to get going again.
If you don’t know what your characters want and need, how are you going to move them through a story?
The Masterwork Experiment podcast concludes with today’s recording. Here’s what I’ve learned.
In this episode Shawn and I spend some talking about the two characters I’ve already begun to define for Danebury Hill: Matthew the footman and Josiah the groom. I argued for giving my characters more of a happy ending, partly because I want to solve the puzzle of how two servant class men in the …
Masterwork Experiment 3: Defining the Characters Read More »
In this episode, I ace the “Beginning Hook, Middle Build, Ending Payoff” summary of Brokeback Mountain, though not without a few tears in my voice, because damn, that story is sad. There’s a huge temptation, in working with someone as accomplished as Shawn Coyne, to play the Good Student and try to get an A …
