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PODCAST · arts
Story Makers Show
by Book Writing World
A Podcast for Every Story Teller
Episodes
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Episode 162: Mystically Curious: an interview with author Sanjena Sathian
In a robust conversation with the wonderful debut novelist Sanjena Sathian, Angie and Elizabeth pick her brain about craft, including defaulting to chronology as a built-in plot structure, and the benefit to stabilizing one variable in an ambitious novel with a lot of moving parts. Other topics...
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Episode 161: Leading with Images: Interview with Yang Huang
In today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth interview author Yang Huang about her new novel, My Good Son. Ideas come to Yang as images first, which she sees as mysteries to be solved and as uncensorable. She wants to tell the truth—through fiction and in English. Topics of discussion include the free...
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Episode 160: Rest and Revolution: a conversation with author Hari Ziyad
In today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth talk with author Hari Ziyad about Hari’s new memoir, Black Boy Out of Time. Because Hari is also a screenwriter who has had interest from the worlds of film and television in adapting their memoir, the conversation touches on the opportunities and…
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Episode 159: Is Tomorrow Yesterday? Chronology in Structure
The promise of knowledge management for the widely curious brain. Paper books and index cards and card catalogs and the art of tracking and linking your ideas. The act of writing is fundamental to thinking. Upended routines as in-person school begins in a small, irregular way. Speaking of...
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Episode 158: Loving Flawed Characters
This week, Elizabeth launches a new project, while Angie starts teaching in-person middle school math, thinking about individual learning strategies and styles. A listener asks, what is the secret to creating flawed characters that readers still want to invest in? The episode zeroes in on some...
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Episode 157: A Toast to the Friction Between Non- and Fiction
As Angie heads from Zoom into the classroom, she and Elizabeth discuss the switching of mediums, the differences between camera and stage. Body language. Elizabeth is working on deciding her next project. Then they dive into the differences and similarities between fictions and nonfiction, their...
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Episode 156: What Shall I Work on Next? Deciding and Getting Started
In today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth report in their debut trailer camping experience, amd compare it to a creative process. Meanwhile,Angie is doing animation, and Elizabeth gives a submissions update. They turn them to answering a listener’s question about which project to choose, exploring...
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Episode 155: And That is When the Murders Began
The episode kicks off with a glance at the trouble with deep work in a pandemic with kids before diving into emotion in story: Emotional arc and emotion as action trigger, emional as both key and causal. It is emotion that drives readers to read, based on desired mood and emotion. There are…
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Episode 154: The Character of Intuitive Planning
Angie teaches math and daydreams a new film while Elizabeth gets a mammogram and considers character questions. In today’s episode, Elizabeth explores the epiphany she began to have on last week’s episode by asking Angie a lot of questions about balancing or toggling between chaos, intuition,...
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Episode 153: Time Management for Narrators
In this week’s episode, a listener asks a question about transitions and pacing, leading to a roving discussion of pacing, logistics, linearity, causality, and intentionality: what is significant—and how do you know? Creating the reader’s experience through character work in both writing and...
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Episode 152: A Generous Frugality: Uses of Poetic Language in Prose
In this episode, Angie and Elizabeth answer a listener’s question about how to use poetic language to story's advantage rather than distraction. This requires teasing apart what, exactly, poetic language entails--compression, metaphor, white space, senstae detail--and what prose writers can gain...
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Episode 151: Systems to Submit Your Work
Happy New Year! Angie and Elizabeth follow their “what are you working on” opening into a deep dive into the art and systems of submitting your work to literary journals, as Elizabeth has begun to do. This includes learning the markets, curating your own backlog, rejection, and representing a...
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Episode 150: Angie Liked a Book
With Elizabeth fresh off virtual Sonoma County Writers Camp, she and Angie discuss the technological opportunities of this moment and how it will carry into the future. This evolves into a consideration of the advantages of dictation and whether typing will turn out to be a brief technological...
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Episode 149: Omniscient First Person: A Thanksgiving Episode
Yay, you voted! And look, it worked. Now buy books from your local indie bookstore. In today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth talk about voice and POV, including the theatrical element of voice, leaning into voice, and when analysis should kick voice into gear. They also talk about the differences...
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Episode 147: Only Connect
Today’s podcast mines for what we can learn about the moments we falter--as when Angie and Elizabeth stopped podcasting for a few weeks. The conversation wonders, Who has more free time right now? And briefly explores revision—how do you know what’s needed when you already know the story so well....
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Episode 146:Stop the Presses! An Interview with Debut Novelist Carole Stivers
Today’s episode features an interview with scientist and debut novelist Carole Stivers, whose new book The Mother Code launches this week. The discussion ranges over climate science fiction, genetic engineering, military biological warfare, parenting, and lots of writing tips. We discuss the...
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Episode 145:Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Plot?
Angie and Elizabeth, car packed to flee amidst the smoke of the Lightening Complex Fires, tackle what is too much plot? What is the difference between significant escalation in a story and the heaping on of chaos and disaster in the real world? Create meaning via choices and understand the ways...
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Episode 144:Having Your Cake: Character’s Driving Desire Story
Angie is figuring out how to figure out what she’s working on, and Elizabeth is working on the external propeller of her novel while starting something new. They grapple with how character desire drives a story, and how a character’s limiting belief impacts that desire, and how both build the...
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Episode 143:The Intersection of Premise and Limiting Belief
Angie is learning about teaching math and either making connections to learning and writing...or developing a unified theory of everything. Elizabeth is in diffuse, “what if” mode, exploring her real values. As they delve into conversation about premise--an expression of values in a story--and...
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Episode 142:A Non-Fiction Scene from Danzy Senna
Today’s episode brings the study of scene to a conclusion with a third scene, this one from Danzy Senna’s non-fiction Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History. Angie and Elizabeth look at the work an opening scene does in establishing vital information--here, establishing a relationship...
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Episode 141:Establishing Scenes: Setting Up Desires, Character, Theme in Action in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys
Continuing the series examining the art of the scene, Angie and Elizabeth delve into an early scene from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Nickel Boys. A deft scene by a highly skilled author. Elizabeth and Angie discuss how what a character wants in a scene ties into the…
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Episode 140:The Final Scene: Elizabeth Strout
After kicking off a series about scene in the last episode, Angie and Elizabeth introduce a specific scene, the final scene in Elizabeth Strout’s short story “The Sign” in her book Anything is Possible. The discussion reviews the criteria established in the last episode and uses these as a...
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139:Scene It All? What Makes Scene Work
Today’s episode informally kicks off a series where Angie and Elizabeth will be discussing scene, that key unit of storytelling across many formats and genres. As an overview, they present a number of elements of scene, including purpose, new information and forward movement of the story,...
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Episode 138: Change in Story and in the World!
On today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth talk about what changes between the ordinary world that starts a story, and the new ordinary world where the characters end up, their limiting beliefs having been utterly challenged, and either changed or tragically failed to change. They look at a “what…
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Episode 137: Necessary Skills: Empathy and Reading #BlackLivesMatter
After a two-week hiatus, Angie and Elizabeth are back asking, how can a story-making show co-hosted by two white queer women serve this moment? They look at balancing forward movement with the state of the world, and then deep dive into the urgency of reading critically and writing cogently. As a...
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Episode 136: Suspects, Motives, and Red Herrings: A Conversation with Author Angie Kim
It was a blast to have Angie Kim on the show talking about her now-in-paperback legal mystery MIRACLE CREEK, and rich and compelling, Edgar-award winning book that touches on themes of motherhood, special needs kids, and immigration, as well as a sweeping legal drama and mystery. Her writing is...
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Episode 135: A Jumping Off Point: Getting and Processing Notes on Your Manuscript
Recorded on Mother’s Day, this episode is about revision and getting notes. After a brief look at the revision process of Angie’s feature screenplay for Lost in the Middle, including a horizontal notebook, other tangible tools, haptic feedback, and table reads, Angie grills, I mean interviews,...
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Episode 134: Salting the Soup: Getting Metaphor Right
Angie and Elizabeth fumble toward answering a listener’s question about metaphor, at first blaming the heat in their pandemic garage studio, but later, if you will, warming to the topic. They consider whether everyone thinks metaphorically, discuss common and dead metaphors, explore the ways...
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Episode 133: Back to the Basics: Survival, Sleep, Gardening, and Yes, Writing in a Time of Trauma.
Angie and Elizabeth dig into some forms, frameworks and rules that can sustain a creative practice in trouble times, including the practice of freewriting, the three rules that run Elizabeth’s craft classes, and opening and closing rituals. An exercise reminds us of the encouraging tenents of...
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Episode 132: Happy Earth Day: A Conversation about Conflict, Crisis, History, and Story
On today’s episode, Angie and Elizabeth delve into conflict in crisis, and what we can learn about story--and history--from the moment we are muddling through. They acknowledge that growth can be uncomfortable, and examine what turns conflict into growth. Also examined: grief, archnemeses (who is...
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Episode 131:The Baby and the Bath Water: What to Throw Out
In this episode, Angie and Elizabeth consider strategies for staying connected to your creativity in this extreme moment. What’s changed and what hasn’t, and what needs to change? Tools considered include the social urge, countering boredom, writing morning pages, lowering expectations, setting...
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Episode 132: Rule Britannia: the Queen’s Speech
Live from our garage, a day late and a dollar short, in the middle of a global pandemic, Angie and Elizabeth have the following, just for you: An update on middle school math and distance learning; the asymptotic process of editing and how to cooperate with and counter your perfections; internal...
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Episode 131:She’s Got Help: Sheltering in Place
Today’s episode asks, how do you find your writing passion while you’re hiding out at home. Routines? Extreme measures? What is called for? Angie and Elizabeth answer a listener’s question. Some of the answers include: doing the part of writing you think is fun when times are challenging…
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Episode 130:Robotic Dogs, Epistolary Novels, Compassion: What Gets Us Through
Today’s shelter-in-place episode delves into what survival strategies teach you about your writing lifestyle and offers a plug for reading and a metaphor, advice from Northern Italy, a couple of writing prompts, a discussion of opportunity cost in plotting, and an answer to the question, why am I...
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Episode 129: Giving Notes: What You Need to Know
This week, Angie is cognitively processing while Elizabeth is rereading her manuscript on hardcopy yet one more time. In this episode, Angie and Elizabeth explore whether their newly cleared yard is a metaphor for anything relevant to writing, and conclude, by the end, that landscaping definitely...
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Episode 128: Arresting and Amusing to the Drunk: a discussion of politics, persuasion, and story
In today's episode, Angie and Elizabeth discuss the use of narrative in the art of persuasion. Coming back to Lindsay Doran’s rules of story, they check them against various politicians' appeals. This leads to an examination of competing stories, hyperbole, lies, character change, and audience....
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Episode 127: Leveling Up: Lessons in Story and the Gamification of Learning
tarting with the Harry Potter theory of gamification, Angie and Elizabeth dive into the ways that attaching story—including costumes, pets, and props as well as wins and losses—to learning motivates students, much as story drives characters and readers. Growth is what excites people, not grades,...
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Episode 126: An Adventure That Will Change Her Forever: a Conversation with Aya de Leon
The inimitable, brilliant Aya de Leon joins us for an inspiring conversation about regime change, the American Dirt controversy, genre, including the elements of a heist plot, and story structure--from the hero’s journey to politics to football and rugby. But that’s not all! We talk how Black/...
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Episode 125: The Rubric of Risk: characters and writers learning and growing
In today’s episode, Angie identifies as the quintessential dilettante while Elizabeth lays out her process of revision. They debate whether the horror genre has shifted or Angie has changed. Most of all, they consider the potential for understanding both learning opportunities for writers and...
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Episode 124: Chapters: A Dinner Party
This episode delves into the art and craft, indeed the very definition, of chapters--in books and a little bit in film, too. Angie and Elizabeth discuss what we need and want to know, narratively; how to play wondering out across a whole novel; the difference between a story and a novel; raising...
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Episode 123: As Simple as Possible: a guide to story
discussion of simplicity in story and the room that gives for character and emotion, and the stakes these create. The need for clarity. Motivation. How to move toward simplicity. Also discussed: revision, pacing, resistance, weather. Family systems. The quote, possibly from Einstein: “Everything...
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Episode 122: Curiouser and Curiouser: A New Year’s Podcast!
A couple of glasses of wine into a loooooong tween-filled vacation, Angie and Elizabeth launch a new year of Story Makers Show with some conversation and advice. Topics covered to varying degrees include: the possibly universal reaction to getting notes on your writing, the possibility of getting...
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Episode 121: Unforgettable: Examples and Theories on What Makes a Story Stick
What makes a story grab you? This episode grapples with that question alongside the challenges of making a best of the year reading or watching list. As they examine what makes a story unforgettable, Angie and Elizabeth discuss imperfect characters, clear goals, enemies, relationships, humor,...
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Episode 120: What’s the Point? Why We Write
In this episode, Angie and Elizabeth examine the importance of knowing why you are writing what you are writing—the core of your story. When do you need to know? How can you discover the point if you’re not sure? Why does it matter? Jumping off from a story boarding lessons Angie taught to some...
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Episode 119: Shoe in a Cage: The Thanksgiving Episode
Angie and Elizabeth begin this episode by musing on the ending of the film Home for the Holidays, and what it tells us about memory and story. Then they continue on to other stories in films and books for which they are grateful, from Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader from 1999 to Almadovar’s...
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Episode 118: Audience, Stories and Syllogisms
This topic of this podcast is audience--who you write for and how knowing that can help or hurt your efforts and your authenticity. But first, Angie is still excited about mindset and mathematics and what the artists and activists of us can learn from these ideas. And Elizabeth is once again...
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Episode 117: Horseshoes and Grenades: A Conversation with Author and Journalist Vanessa Hua
Elizabeth and Angie were thrilled to talk with author and journalist Vanessa Hua about her award-winning novel, A River of Stars, her collection of short stories Deceit and Other Possibilites, and her work as a journalist. Vanessa is in the process of revising her actual first novel, which will…
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Episode 116: The Fire (2019 Edition): Emotional Logic
This episode was recorded before mandatory evactuations forced us south, and it is being released a week late! Is it ironic that we touch on the fires as our way into dicussing emotional logic in narrative? We delve into the importance of understanding why your character is making a particular...
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Episode 115: Brain Training for Writers
Today’s podcast is all about growth mindset, from the very beginning checking in about what they are working on. Angie is learning a lot as she re-created the Book in a Year curriculum videos, and Elizabeth teaches best when she is at her own edge. Brain plasticity is the topic, and how it…
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Episode 114: Breaking Down Burnout
Today on the show, Angie and Elizabeth discuss burnout--what it feels like, where it comes from, whether it matters where it comes from, what to do about it, if there is anything to do about it, and more. What is productivity and how are we managing it? Are the things we are checking off our to…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Story Makers Show have?
Story Makers Show currently has 164 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Story Makers Show about?
A Podcast for Every Story Teller
How often does Story Makers Show release new episodes?
Story Makers Show publishes regularly with 164 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Story Makers Show?
You can listen to Story Makers Show on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Story Makers Show?
Story Makers Show is created and hosted by Book Writing World.
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