“In most cultures, stories entail causality and goals, and so that’s what listeners expect when they hear a story. This expectation is so strong that the listener will use them when remembering the story, even if the story lacked these elements.” –Daniel T. Willingham “The Privileged Status of Story” (2004) “By telling stories, you objectify…
1) Plays are written with a communal audience in mind I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal…
Writing craft: Studying a show’s pilot script is a useful way for aspiring scriptwriters to get a sense for how its creators chose to establish the world of the story, introduce its characters, and leave the viewer wanting more.
Interview: Rolf talks with travel writer Pico Iyer about his book “The Man Within My Head,” and how art can help us identify parts of ourselves we never otherwise could have articulated.
Interview: Rolf talks with the legendary travel author about technology, traveling light, reportorial accuracy, notions of home, and the “Tao of Travel.”
Nearly five years ago my old mentor Don George approached me with some interview questions for a book on travel writing he was putting together for Lonely Planet. My Q&A appeared on pp. 35-38 of Travel Writing, which hit bookstores worldwide in early 2005. With Travel Writing going into a second edition this year, I…
Not long ago, Abha Malpani queried me for a Written Road post she was writing about whether or not beginner writers should write for free in the name of building up story clips. Should a person, she asked, be open to writing without pay in the beginning of their career? This is what I told her:…
The Write To Travel blog recently interviewed me about my experiences as a professional travel writer. The Q&A format mimicked the questions I ask writers in my own Travel Writers series, and our resulting exchange might be termed “6 Answers About Life As a Professional Travel Writer.” Here’s what was discussed: 1) Did you always want…
For the past seven years, I’ve been asking my various travel writer interview subjects how they got started writing. Frank Bures recently asked me that same question for a travel-writing class he’s teaching, and this is what I told him: My writing aspirations can be traced back to about age 13, when I started writing…
As I think I’ve mentioned before on this blog, college students researching journalism, travel literature, and Americans abroad interview me quite frequently. I rarely see the final result of these academic research projects, but I always find the interview process interesting — and hence I will share some of these interviews in coming weeks. I’ll…
A reader named Scott recently wrote me with the following question: How do you get published? I am working on a book proposal, but publishers don’t take unsolicited manuscripts or proposals and agents don’t seem to want unpublished writers. The book is nonfiction, about living and working in Russia for the last two years. I…
