Episode 249: Craft Books and Resources

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Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing an unscripted episode where the Verbivore unpacks some great craft books and resources she’s currently using in her writing life.

Over the last year, we’ve done a wide range of topics — from writing about disabilities to writing with empathy —that took a lot of energy and preparation. We’ve also been doing this podcast for almost 5 years and as we near our 250th episode we felt it would be good to do a series of episodes getting back to our roots of how this first began — through unplanned conversations about life, books, and the writing craft. So, for the next few episodes we’re continuing to see where our conversations take us, without planning in advance what we’ll talk about.

In this conversation, The verbivore digs into some of the lessons she’s been learning and writing muscles she’s working through craft books and resources. Things like:

  • Great takeaways on writing romance in Jennifer Probst’s Write Naked with anecdotes from her own experience and also advice on various topics from the perspectives of many different authors that she surveyed for her book.

  • Gary Provost’s 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing has thought-provoking and potent little nuggets for strengthening your writing sorted out by a wide range of topics. 

  • My Lady Jane for its refreshing and irreverent storytelling style.

  • House Beautiful paint book with word descriptions from designers that paint the story of a given color and the setting it fits well within. Great for working on building up your own visual description vocabulary.

  • Inside Pixar (2020) looks at story creation, connection, and meaning-making from a variety of lenses within the Pixar setting, especially for the nuggets of wisdom around the Soul and Onward story idea generation, development, and creation processes.

  • The Imagineering Story (book) and The Imagineering Story (2019 documentary series) that includes anecdotes on overcoming creative challenges, developing a strong sense of place, meaning-creation and emotional connection, the importance of details from a storytelling perspective, and Disney’s visual setting description rules.

Towards the end of this discussion, we talk about getting to a closeup level of description for a setting and using visceral language to make it come to life for the reader or audience. Like asking how the metal feels in your hand when you turn a doorknob. Is there paint peeling? Is the metal cold? This connects with the idea of getting into the body to pay attention to how something feels or to imagine how something would feel when those details will help further your story and create deeper connection with your characters, and then working to bring that sensation to life through your word choices.

We hope you enjoy this episode and the more improvisational format of this series and that some of this connects with your own journey!

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Books and Films Mentioned:

Music from:https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Bethany Stedman