by marissa | May 23, 2015 | Craft of Storytelling (Writing Techniques & Ideas)
On the Brainpickings website today, I stumbled into a few collections of Joan Didion’s thoughts, loved everything she had to say, and immediately bought two Didion books. 🙂 ♥ Here’s a favorite quote from her talk on “Why I Write”… All I...
by marissa | May 10, 2014 | Craft of Storytelling (Writing Techniques & Ideas)
Beautiful treat for writers! An artist named James Harris has illustrated the main storytelling elements (story structure, plots, plot devices, character types, and production terms) in an elegant Periodic Table of Storytelling. Each element is linked to the relevant...
by marissa | Sep 7, 2013 | Craft of Storytelling (Writing Techniques & Ideas)
David Foster Wallace, on how television can be great for writers… First, television does a lot of our predatory human research for us. American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on. But...
by marissa | Jun 4, 2013 | Books Edited by Marissa, Science Fiction
Just started reading my copy of The Scorpion Game by Daniel Jeffries, which is now available to buy for the Amazon Kindle, and I’m excited about it all over again. I helped to co-edit this story, and re-reading it has reminded me how much fun it was to work...
by marissa | Jan 16, 2013 | Craft of Storytelling (Writing Techniques & Ideas)
Accomplished writers know that to write a great story, you need characters with internal conflicts that motivate them in a plot full of external conflicts. But something less often talked about is how to put conflict into language itself. Turning sentences or...
