Thinking Like a Writer: Positive Thinking

How mental attitudes might reverse the effects of old age: A conversation with Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer about her latest research on how positive thinking can improve your health.

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2014-12-01/ellen_langer_mindfulness_and_the_power_of_thought

Website: http://www.ellenlanger.com/art/

15 Insights from John August on his Creative Spark

Pixar’s Successful Storytelling Rules Examined in Insightful Video

 

 Produced by Bloop Animation.

The video explores what makes a great idea and how Pixar gets to the essence of their stories.

Written by Dean Movshovitz Based on the 22 rules of storytelling by Emma Coats.

8 Insights taken from Michael Arndt for Setting a Story into Motion

I saw the post on John August's site, Michael Arndt on setting a story in motion, and was inspired by the short video that John shared where Toy Story 3's screenwriter Michael Arndt explores how to get a story started.

Finding the Main Event

Recently on the ScriptNotes podcast entitled My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’s Screenwriter, Mike Birbiglia, a writer, director, performer, and creator of "Sleepwalk With Me" shared a very good insight about creating a story. Often, in writing, the suggestion is to start with your ending so that you know where you are going.

Mike said:

...is finding a main event that the whole film or play builds towards. And if that main event is interesting enough, all you have to do is build backwards to it so that secretly, as a writer, your little trick is that you know that no one has any idea that where you’re going is pretty fascinating.

Alice Munro - Nobel Laureate of Short Stories

I stayed at home until noon. I was supposed to be doing housework, and I would also do my writing then. Later on, when I wasn’t working everyday in the store, I would write until everybody came home for lunch and then after they went back, probably till about two-thirty, and then I would have a quick cup of coffee and start doing the housework, trying to get it all done before late afternoon.

Interview with Alice Munro, Paris Review

Today it was announced that Alice Munro, the renowned short-story writer, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Alice Munro has published many short stories.

Here are a number of her short stories available for reading online

• The Bear Came Over the Mountain
• Amundsen
• Gravel
• Face
• Deep Holes
• Free Radicals
• Dimension
• Wenlock Edge
• A View from Castle Rock

A good guide to navigating the volume of prose produced by Munro was published in The Millions.

Neil Gaiman: You Have to Write When You’re Not “Inspired”

If you only write when you are inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet but you will never be a novelist.

Neil Gaiman

Making the Ordinary to be Extraordinary

In this installment of Creation Stories, Ricky Gervais shares a doozy about an early, indelible writing lesson, telling a story about how he learned to write.

[Source: Fast Create]

Locate Your Obsessions

I always tell students, when I teach writing, to locate their obsessions, and look to them when they’re searching for the story they should be telling. When a writer attaches her work to the engine of what she cares about most passionately (even irrationally, perhaps) the work will be infused with a similar passion, I believe. And come into being most organically.

Joyce Maynard

8 Cool Ways to Stoke Your Creative Juices

A great post over at nofilm school explores some traditional and less orthodox approaches to stir up your innate creative juices and get out great storytelling elements.

Check out this article 8 Somewhat Unusual Screenwriting Tips That May Help Kickstart and Maintain Your Creativity

• Freewrite
• Get a journal and make it your own
• Take your characters to lunch
• Talk to yourself
• Do bizarre things that make you embarrassed of yourself
• Become a voyeur
• Be your characters
• Take time to just marinate

Finding Inspiration - Look at What's Out There

In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen.
Very sincerely, Rudyard Kipling

There is a lot of chatter about the discovery that Rudyard Kipling found inspiration for the Jungle Book in other works.

Which raises the age old question for writers and creative minds alike, where do we get our inspiration. As some talkback comments have called Kipling a thief, others explain the matter as having "executed a work on a similar subject under the same title to much greater effect in a different style."

Namely we can dip into the existing works for creative inspiration, where our project will be wholly unique, with a specific voice we call our own.

As I continue to develop my narrative style, I am looking into what others share about where they get their inspiration, and find the key to the creative voice and stories that we have locked inside.