How to Talk about Your Story
Our panel on “How to Talk about Your Story” included Mike Salisbury, Ryan Campbell, and Michelle Rascon. Scroll down to the bottom to see the replay.
A few links to pass on from Ryan:
- Your Logline: Your Novel in 50 Words or Fewer
- Novel Approaches on Multi-POV Storytelling
- Writing Prompt or Logline Generator (for fun)
Ryan has also shared a synopsis from his multi-POV novel Imminent Dawn, which may serve as a good example for how to get all those POVs into a two-page summary: Imminent Dawn Synopsis.
Michelle has passed on these samples: Effective Pitches.
And Mike passes along these samples from published work:
For Karen Russell’s story, “The Prospectors”: In “The Prospector,” Russell goes to a favorite premise: a young person falls for — at least, temporarily — someone who is dead or some semblance thereof. It begins as a realistic story with a historical setting. During the Depression, Clara and Aubergine, the first-person narrator of the piece, run away from home and make their way west, calling themselves “prospectors” because, to survive, they filch money from the men they seduce, men who think they’re taking advantage of the girls. They are, of course, but the girls feel like they’re in on the scheme and, therefore, somehow in control. Note that this is a short story, and while it’s far less likely that you’ll use a pitch like this for a short story, it’s still valuable to be able to articulate the story’s core. And here is the one he referenced from In the Quick: A young, ambitious female astronaut’s life is upended by a fiery love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew in this brilliantly imagined novel in the tradition of Station Eleven and The Martian.
For those who registered for the whole weekend, you can check out the Showing Emotion replay or the Writing Attraction replay.
Thanks for attending!
