There was a life before us my sister and I discovered, silently looking at photographs we shouldn’t have been looking at of the English girl my father was engaged to during the war. Here she is right in front of our eyes, the woman before my mother, in a black lace cocktail dress holding a…
One of the writing projects I’ve been working on this winter is Last Nine, a coming-of-age screenplay I’ve been chipping away at for more than a decade now. Built around a single incident I remember from my high school Spanish class when I was 17 years old, Last Nine tells the story of a teenager…
“I always want to remind people that the word fiction doesn’t come from some imaginary Latin verb meaning I make things up as I go along. It actually comes from a real Latin verb which means I give shape to. The essence of fiction is shaping, patterning, and plotting, using symbols, handling narrative, all those…
Poetry: “A well-known circus man who was reputed to be immune from snake bites, died at the County Hospital after having been bitten by a rattlesnake.”
Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, Keep probability-some say-in view. But my advice to story-tellers is: Weigh out no gross possibilities, Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of Known instances of virtue, crime or love. To forge a picture that will pass for true, Do conscientiously what liars do- Born liars, not the lesser…
What follows is an abridged transcript of Tim Ferriss’s podcasting advice from Deviate with Rolf Potts, Episode One. Sub-section topics within the interview include the following: 1. How Tim Ferriss Got into Podcasting 2. How to Frame Questions in an Interview 3. The Advantages of Doing the Interview by Skype 4. Deciding if Podcasting is…
“Successful travel writing mediates between two poles: the individual physical things it describes, on the one hand, and the larger theme that it is ‘about’ on the other. That is, the particular and the universal. A travel book will make the reader aware of a lot of things — ships, planes, trains, donkeys, sore feet,…
1) A journal forces you to think clearly about the day “The journal calmed me and forced me to think clearly about the day. Often the day had been muddled with so many things happening one after another that the only way to straighten it out was to write about it, reliving it until the…
The following is adapted from a lecture in my July 2017 screenwriting class at the Paris Writing Workshop. 1. All characters must suffer. No Game of Thrones character avoids misery. How they deal with suffering is how we learn who they are. 2. Obligation must be at odds with desire. No Game of Thrones character…
“As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn’t matter if the plot is emotional, intellectual, or physical — as long as it compels the reader to…
From Off Assignment’s recurring feature devoted to the letters that travel writers pen during their earliest hours in alien lands, Rolf shares a 2000 letter he wrote to his new Belgian girlfriend from Laos.
