storytelling

How are you doing keeping your kids occupied while you try to get work done at home? Many parents are asking for suggestions. I have some ideas that I think you’ll love! And no, I won’t be talking about learning the piano or taking up photography. Those are costly and take a long time. The ones below are cheap and don’t need pre-planning.… View More

Everything goes back to childhood. In primary school, there was a reading comprehension exercise that still haunts me to this day. It’s where you read a short story, and at the end of it, you had to answer a series of questions. The first question was… View More

I recently came across a book on storytelling entitled, The Myth Gap, What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? by Alex Evans. Storytelling is something I’m interested in. I want my images to have a storyäóîwith a beginning, a middle, and an end.… View More

As mentioned last week, I started reading Pride & Prejudice. What a wonderful book! I couldn’t put it down even though I already saw the movie and knew what would happen. I was reading the annotated version of Pride & Prejudice. This book is annotated by Shawn Coyne, a book editor of over… View More

We get the wrong message in movies. If you are not saving the world, getting rich, or living happily every after by the end of the story, then it’s not worth telling. I get it. A movie that is quiet and doesn’t have explosions will not have broad appeal. Movies are expensive to make. Studios have… View More

Could we look at going to work as a hero’s journey just like in the movies? How would that go? Hollywood movies like Joy follow the arc of the Hero’s Journey, popularized by Joseph Campbell who first identified this universal pattern in mythological stories from around the world.… View More

Recently I was part of a team at work that had to prepare a powerpoint presentation. One of the requirements was that this presentation had to have a clear story. How would we actually do that? I suggested the ABT template of storytelling. ABT stands for AND-BUT-THEREFORE. About two years ago, a… View More

I just came back from Robert McKee’s Story Seminar held in New York City. McKee is well known in Hollywood as the Story Doctor. He teaches the structure of stories and how they work. While he focuses on movies, his teachings can be applied to all kinds of storytelling–including the wordless novel that I am attempting in A Million Suns. That is why I signed up; it’s part of my ongoing research. Up to this point (Parts I and II), I’ve been cobbling together an understanding of story structure. I decided that it was time to seek help and learn from an expert.… View More

A blog reader sent me a link to this NPR news article and said, “you might want to write about this.” In this news article, a woman born without a uterus gave birth to a healthy baby after getting a uterus transplant.… View More