THE STORY SPOT

Make of this what you will.

“Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts” (all 46 of ‘em) from LIFE Magazine.
Click through to the LIFE site to read the captions (and names, sheesh!) about each author.
Thanks to Mike H. for the linkage.

We’re sure, being the literary wunderkinds that you are, you already knew that April is National Poetry Month, the month when “publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture.” That’s from the official website of National Poetry Month, www.poets.org, presented by the Academy of American Poets.

While poetry’s “vital place” may sometimes be questionable in these times but you wordsmiths and lovers of lyrical artistry know the value poetry has for your own work…don’t you? (Hint: if not, it’s time you found out.)

National Poetry Month(2009 poster)

• Re-discover your favourite national, international, living, and historically significant poets.

• Find new poems to enjoy.

• Marvel at your state’s poetic history & current happenings.
(Californians, click here!)

• And, if that’s not enough, here’s your free Poem Flow iPhone app.

Now go write some haiku or something.

Author Christina Baker Kline (Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be) did us the great favour of transcribing a recent interview with director James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic) in which he offers storytelling wisdom that is simple but oh so true:

It’s always about the characters and about how those characters express something that the audience is feeling.  So it has to have some universality to it, having to do with relationships, whether it’s male-female, parent-child, whatever it is. And then you have to take them on a journey. And then you have to make it excruciating somehow.

Like that? Sounds so simple, no? Need a hand getting started? Try this: Is Your Hero Sympathetic and What the Heck Does That Mean?

And by the way, you can catch up on Ms. Kline’s latest right here on THE STORY SPOT: she’s now part of our Literati (updated live as bloggers post–if you don’t see her now, try again later.) Click through to read more and subscribe.

Read “The Essential Elements of Storytelling … according to James Cameron” on Christina Baker Kline’s blog, “A Writing Life”
Watch James Cameron interviewed by Charlie Rose

Pardon us for saying but this is bloody brilliant. Beat Sheet Central is author, screenwriter, and director Nicholas Jarecki‘s site where he collects breakdowns — *beat sheets* — of movies and tv episodes for your free learning pleasure.

Often when I’m writing a film or teleplay, I like to go back and look at movies and TV shows in similar genres and see how they are constructed. The point of this site is to collect beat sheets for every movie and TV episode, generated by you, the users, by watching the pieces and writing down exactly what happens.

An excellent companion site to one of our most popular posts: “Breaking It Down: Improving Your Scripts.” So get to work and when you’ve finished, why not contribute your own beat sheet?

(Novelists and memoirists, don’t go thinking you have a Get Out of Jail Free card. Nope. Learning to “beat out” your lengthier stories is every bit as beneficial. Bonus: if you can do it for a film, you can do it for a book.)

On authors, editors, and the state of the Publishing Union, author Declan Burke (Crime Always Pays and The Big O) says it better than most in a recent guest column in Irish Publishing News:

…like-minded writers should get together and set up a co-op, akin to the United Artists studio of early Hollywood lore. In theory, it can be done: e-publishing and print-on-demand are just two elements of contemporary technology that allow writers to circumvent the publishing circus and go straight to readers.

He also quotes author Henry Porter from a related post on the Guardian Book Blog:

What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.

Hey, that’s a great idea.

“So You Say You Want A Revolution?” in Irish Publishing News (with links to the original post on his blog)
“As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing: Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work” by Henry Porter at The Guardian Blog (observer.guardian.co.uk)