Subscribe to my YouTube Channel for long-form content that dives deep into stories you know and love. I explore what makes our favorite stories compelling and what makes the stories we dislike unsatisfying.
Follow me on TikTok for short-form storytelling content that gives tips and tricks on writing and storytelling. I examine tropes, give examples of popular uses of them, and sometimes dive into single episodes of TV.
Today, I want to give you permission that you might not be realizing you've been withholding from yourself: Today, you can suck. I mean it. You have permission to get out your pen and notebook (or, more likely, to open your word processor) and just suck. Write poorly. Be bad. Just suck.
I spoke with an old coworker once who told me about their brilliant idea for a novel that they would like to write "some day." I asked them what was stopping them as they were clearly excited about the idea and felt that it was something they'd want to read themself. They didn't have a compelling answer. They ran into the issue that so many writers I know have fallen into: Getting started is a bitch. Writing a novel is hard and eating that particular elephant is a daunting proposition.
Did you ever read Death of a Salesman? Because you should. It's one of my favorite works of literature and possibly one of the most intriguing treatises ever written on life satisfaction/dissatisfaction. I'm going to share some pieces of it here to illustrate a few important parts of your next step in building the-world-that-should-be.
When the world we live in doesn't match up with the world that we should live in, what do we do? It's a bear of a question and I invite you to chew it over and wrestle with it for as long as you need to to come to your own conclusions. I'll share mine with you today.
The Adam Project is a feel good sci-fi action thriller that doesn't quite live up to its own premise and feels confused about what kind of movie it wants to be. 3/5 stars.
A few interesting visuals and some fine acting aren't enough to save a screenplay that feels like it was written in the early aughts for fans of movies like Daredevil and Ghost Rider. 2/5 stars.
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Head on over to my resource section for some freebies that just might make creating your story a little easier.