Summer Stationery for When You’re Going Nowhere

by Eva, in category The Writer's Life

The other day I was thinking about how my passion for Traveler’s Notebooks is strangely at odds with my disinterest in travel.

My summer stationery line-up is hardly suitable for hot weather or for light packing: Harris Tweed covers, TNs thick with full refills, clips, and pendant fountain pens, and passport holders used for notebooks rather than actual passports…

The idea of “going nowhere” amuses me, because to my mind, these notebooks can take me anywhere I want to go.

And if you’re feeling stuck this summer, allow me to share this perspective with you.

Read More

How to Read Your Life Like a Story

by Eva, in category Plotting, Story Scholar, The Writer's Life

☞ The cheatsheet in this video can be found in the Bestseller Over Breakfast collection.

The Story Structure of Your Life – Transcript

This is the one page story structure that I’ve been teaching for over a decade now. And over the years, I found that the real value of a story structure like this isn’t to plot a story quickly or to get a really interesting character arc. It can certainly do those things. But for me, the real value of learning and studying something like this has been the way that I can use this framework to study different narratives that I come across and especially the narrative of my own life. I feel that a framework like this really gives you perspective. It really gives you a bigger picture of the things that are happening in your life. The things that you feel you need to do, the things that you want to do and accomplish, the Resolutions you have, the the goals you have, and how you feel along each stage of the journey to receiving them or accomplishing them. I really feel that having a framework like this that you can apply to, for example, the novels you’re reading, the stories you’re reading to better understand them, to grasp the nuances better, especially if you’re a writer, because then you can use those insights yourself in your own own stories to guide the narrative or even to to do stylistic work, to understand why certain ways of saying something work better. But that’s still a very granular approach. So I think if we look at the the larger picture and we look at each of these stages and we understand what goes on in each of these stages and we gain a better understanding of how that feels in our own life, in our own experience, then I think there’s a lot of amazing insight. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned there. And I found, as I said over the years, that that has been the real gem for me in this one page novel method. So, let’s take a closer look and let’s maybe find some clues in our own lives that we can apply. I genuinely feel that by the end of this video, you will have gained at least some insight into some aspect of your life.

Read More