R.Moon's picture
R.Moon from The City of Champions is reading The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion; Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schimdt PH.D; Creating Characters by the editors of Writer's Digest October 7, 2014 - 8:19pm

I'm curious if anyone has ever watched this. Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler takes you through his process of creating a short story for a collection entitled Had a Good Time. There are seventeen episodes and each episode is just under two hours long. I've watched about the first half of them and it's fascinating to watch a Pulitzer Prize winning author work. It's inspiring and motivating, but at times it can be dull (it is, after all, watching a guy write), but he explains what he's doing and why he's doing it. It was filmed in his office at FSU. Just wondering if anyone has seen it and what your thoughts are. I left the Youtube link below for anyone interested.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTCv6n1whoI23GmdBZienRW0Q0nFCU_ay

 

 

Linda's picture
Linda from Sweden is reading Fearful Symmetries October 8, 2014 - 3:54am

I came across the video once, and it's quite a treat, what he's doing I mean. But the thought of actually watching the thing is a bit daunting just the same.

MattF's picture
MattF from Tokyo is reading Borges' Collected Fictions October 8, 2014 - 6:58am

There was a thread on it a long time ago--no post-watching discussion though:

http://litreactor.com/discuss/robert-olen-butler-lectures

I planned to watch it, started watching it, and still kind of want to watch it, but... knowing that my favorite writing procrastination is "studying" writing, there was something about not working on my own writing, while simultaneously watching someone else doing the exact thing I should have been doing, that ramped my self-loathing up to dangerous levels. The longer I watched, the more pathetic I felt.

How much have you watched, and what's the most interesting thing you've pulled from the experience?

R.Moon's picture
R.Moon from The City of Champions is reading The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion; Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schimdt PH.D; Creating Characters by the editors of Writer's Digest October 10, 2014 - 8:40pm

I've watched about half of the episodes. The most interesting pulled? Good question. He likes to edit as he goes and I'm the same way, but despite the on-the-fly editing he manages to get a lot of new words down and I think that's what I most took away from it. I was the guy who'd labor over a chapter or a scene, trying to get it perfect, before I moved on and I'd be stuck on it forever. Now, I have a nice balance of editing on-the-fly and getting more words down. My focus now is not perfection, but progress and I think his lectures illustrate that very well. Take a look. It's actually quite fascinating, especially the first few episodes where the story is just coming out, just starting to bloom.