THE STORY SPOT

Screenwriter Alex Epstein (of Complications Ensue fame) will be teaching a  webinar in July on one of our favorite subjects: The Hook.

Webinars, as you know, are great, accessible brush-up classes for those in the trenches as well as a low-pressure, low-cost subject intro to new writers.

Support your writing (and Alex’s writing life — full-circle, people) by signing up today.

The Hook – Get your script read!
$69.99
Saturday July 25th from noon-3pm EST / 9am-noon PST
Webinar via Topjian

Read on »

Here’s your Friday thought:
Expertise can be yours with a simple 10,000 hour investment.

We writers–high-school students to showrunners to Nobel Laureate novelists–certainly know a few things when it comes to creating stories. We make people laugh, we make them cry, and–if we’re lucky– our audience claims our stories as a part of them forever.

Even that phenomenal success does not necessarily mean we may claim the title of “expert”…not in its truest sense, anyway (for there is much room in our culture for casual use of the idea). It doesn’t mean we know all there is to know about our art, our craft. Today’s post is a reminder to seek out that which we DO NOT know in our work and learn more about it. Today. Do it. Just one thing.

Want to know how to become an overnight success? Sure, there are people who, every minute, land in New York, London, and Hollywood’s eager laps and get swooped up into the publicity machine to be lauded as fantastic! A spectacular spectacular! And surely they are all of those things…but perhaps “dazzling” isn’t an all-encompassing definition of success nor expertise.

You need a particular kind of practice— deliberate practice —to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.

– Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology, Florida State University

So whoever you are, whatever your accomplishments, keep working. Stay curious. And remember that you will always have learned more than someone else and there is always someone who has learned more than you do. And that’s a great thing.

The Expert on Experts by Christopher Percy Collier at Fast Company
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
The New York Times talks with Roger Moore (a podcast direct link)

So I was at one of those pay-$15-bucks-to-hear-what-
you-already-know literary industry panels tonight. You know the kind where you’re surrounded by people who only leave the house to go to hear how they can find an agent who will adore their really great book–really, it’s great!–and find them a million-dollar advance? (Hey, I had nothin’ to do on a Monday night and I’m looking for an agen–never mind). And the inevitable questions were asked including: “Why has the world so completely switched from fiction-love to non-fiction-love?”

Answers were offered by very qualified people but still, I wanted to chime in here, if I may. It seems to me that the reasons for this can be somewhat easily observed: we, as a culture, have moved from the joys of being lost in the imaginative realm of fiction just as we have moved increasingly towards being a rational, logic and Spock-driven society, though we don’t know it. By that, I mean that we’ve steadily moved away from emotional experience–or at least the open acknowledgment and seeking of it. I don’t even know if we realize it as individuals. But, being human, we still need and crave emotional, imaginative experiences even when it is not fashionable to say so (even when we have lost our abilities to recognize what is missing). Listen, why else have we swarmed en masse to reality television and to books about harrowing emergence from impossible odds? It’s the visceral experience that draws us again and again. Yet we are not free, somehow, to enjoy the departure from rationality if it is not based in fact. Shame, that. The better questions are: what’s happening to reading, to our culture?

This too shall pass.

This is so exciting, I can’t stand it…

When I’m too lazy to dig out the Chicago Manual, I turn to a bevy of online sites to help with word usage. Today, I found Grammar Girl (all hail!). She’s not only a sassy vixen but she simplifies all your most pressing grammar needs into memorable, usable, bites. I highly recommend you stop by and say hello.

You go Grammar Girl.
Get on with your bad self.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Other helpful sites for the wordographer:

Washington State’s Common Errors in English
Princeton’s WordNet
and, when in doubt, get the Urban Dictionary out, y’alls.
Peace.

Got an hour per week to save this country? Help a kid with their reading and writing skills.

Here’s an appeal from our friends over at 826LA (and soon to be, 826LA East):

Hi there, friend of 826LA!

The fall season is, ahem, falling upon us, and as fall seasons go, this one is bringing in an abundant number of eager young faces to our space in Venice. We have students coming in to drop-in tutoring, students attending exciting new workshops, like Spotlight On FEAR, and If I Were King or Queen, and classes coming in for the ever-heart-pounding Storytelling and Bookmaking field trips, as well as in-school projects.

Old friend or new, we have many many opportunities for volunteers to help us out! We especially need people to come in to tutor at drop-in, Monday through Thursday, 2:30-5:30 pm. We’re extremely flexible: come in any day, any week, for any amount of time. It’s an exciting time for our drop-in program; newly painted walls, a new table, some new chairs, a new calendar for our in-house student writing publications, Dogtown Books, and most of all, plenty of kids–old and new–who could use your help in writing that wild story about rainbows or annoying siblings or monsters. Or ice cream. Or monsters made out of ice cream. You get the idea.

Send us an email at info@826la.com!

Your friend,
826LA

–

**About 826LA**

826LA
685 Venice Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90291
310.305.8418
info@826la.org
www.826la.org

826LA is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Our services are structured around the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.