Post #6 – Memoir and Fiction, Writing Alchemy – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Elizabeth Berg, New York Times bestseller author, is a prolific writer who has honed her skills over many years. About 10 years ago, she decided to share her insights and thoughts on the process of writing in her book, Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True
In particular, Kendra and I found so many rich nuggets of writing wisdom that we would not be using in our book that we decided to find a way to share them with readers of this website. We started with audio conversations, picking one book about writing by a well-known writer and one concept from the many available. After several recordings that we’ve posted on this site, we changed our minds and began creating videos instead. Even those have changed in format, but I think we now have a fairly consistent format that will make it easy for you to pick up a new tip about the craft of writing fiction and memoir in less than 10 minutes. Our goal is to keep these videos to five minutes since almost anyone can give that much time to a video. In all honesty, while we call these Writing in Five, we have not exactly mastered the five minute brevity we aspire to achieve. All our videos are definitely less than 10 minutes and we promise to keep working on our skills so that we can deliver on our five-minute promise.
Today’s video was inspired by Elizabeth Berg’s book. We hope it gives you a new way of thinking about story, its point, and the emotions it evokes. I shared a paragraph from Elizabeth Berg’s book with two of my students to get their feedback on whether it would be helpful to them. I’ve included a little segment from my interview with them in this Writing in Five.
Don’t look for consistency of content in our short videos. These Quick Tips offer all matter of tips and advice. We started this series with words from Stephen King and Rita Mae Brown and moved on from there. We went from grammar tips to writing philosophy. The only constant in Writing in Five is that you are getting good writing advice from professional–published authors. Writing in Five is not a How-to series. We’re not giving you simplistic formulae for writing a book. No, we’re focused on the ideas and techniques that the best of the best apply to their own work.
Enjoy. Here’s this week’s video.
writing tip
famous writer
Writing Alchemy
