Mulling in the Hammock
I was lying in the hammock, enjoying the sunshine and letting a story idea percolate, when I came across this quote:
“It’s a shame that creativity and sloth look exactly the same.”
- Louise Penny, The Murder Stone.
I really am hard at work.
Maureen
Storytellers are dangerous people
I’ve been working my way through Story, by Robert McKee, a book on screenwriting. I’m finding it dense and slow but enormously useful. Here’s a story he tells:
“In 388 B.C. Plato urged the city fathers of Athens to exile all poets and storytellers. They are a threat to society, he argued. Writers deal with ideas, but not in the open, rational manner of philosophers. Instead, they conceal their ideas inside the seductive emotions of art. Yet felt ideas, as Plato pointed out, are ideas nonetheless. Every effective story sends a charged idea out to us, in effect compelling the idea into us, so that we must believe. In fact, the persuasive power of a story is so great that we may believe its meaning even if we find it morally repellent. Storytellers, Plato insisted, are dangerous people.” pp. 129-130
Here’s to storytellers!
Maureen
Musings: WGA Wordsworth writing camp YABS Youthwrite
by Maureen Bush
uncommented
Writing Camp
Lia came home all jazzed up from a week at writing camp. The camp is Wordsworth, run by the Young Alberta Book Society (YABS), the successor to Youthwrite, run by the Writer’s Guild of Alberta (WGA). In spite of the organizational change, to the kids it was a continuation of 14 years of brilliant camps.
I recommend it highly for teens who love to write (and act and sing and play and joke and improvise and hang out with an incredibly supportive and creative bunch of kids, supervisors and instructors).
They put on a show for parents, entertaining us with their writing, body rhythm, acting and drumming. After the show, the kids won my heart when they gathered on the lawn and sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallalujah.
Maureen
Sunburst Honourable Mention
Feather Brain has received an Honourable Mention for the 2009 YA Sunburst Award (that’s The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic). I’m a little puzzled, as Feather Brain is nowhere near a YA book, but still . . . this is fun. It’s a thrill to be on the Honourable Mention list with Arthur Slade (Jolted), and Kenneth Oppel (Starclimber), and one of my all-time favorites is on the shortlist: Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.
The Shortlist (5 books) and Honourable Mention list (7 titles) would be a great place to search for recent Canadian fantasy and sci fi titles.
Maureen