Mommy's Pen

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The Mommy’s Pen Podcast – Episode 2: Cleopatra & the First Plot Point

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This week on the podcast we discuss ancient Egyptian body odor and the story structure concept of the first plot point.

It’s twelve minutes of fun! Listen now…

We are now available on Apple podcasts! As a new show, reviews are VERY important to help us grow. Please consider leaving a review.

You can also listen using any number of podcast platforms and apps including Spotify, Breaker, Pocket Casts, Radio Public, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts.

Show Notes:

Season 1, Episode 2: First Plot Point

Nora reviews Cleopatra VII: Daughter of the Nile from the Royals Diaries series. Sue explains the function of a first plot point (FPP) and Nora takes a stab at identifying the FPP in Cleopatra and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Nora also clues us in on how ancient Egyptians handled body odor (hint: it involves snakes) and points to some great places to learn more about history.

Read the full transcript.

Things we mention that you should check out:

  • Our mailing list! Sign up today and you’ll get cool subscriber only perks like bonus material and artwork from my forthcoming novel, The Cat, the Cash, the Leap and the List.
  • You can follow Mary Beard on Twitter and read her column “A Don’s Life” in the Times Literary Supplement. But please do yourself a big favor and head over to YouTube, search for her name, and start binge watching documentaries on ancient Rome. This woman is one of my heroes — a brilliant presenter AND totally unwilling to wear make-up or a bra while fronting programs for the BBC.
  • Horrible Histories started as book series and is now a television series in the UK. It’s bloody good fun and you can watch all the episodes on Hulu.com.
  • If you want to learn more about first plot points and a four-act structure for stories, I highly recommend the work of Larry Brooks. You can see a list of his books at the Story Fix website.

This post was lovingly sponsored by my Patreon supporters (you can become one, too!). 

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Announcing the Mommy’s Pen Podcast!

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What could be better than sharing a passion with your kid? Nora (age 11) and I love to talk about books and what makes a good story, so we decided to start a podcast so everyone else can listen in.

So, go ahead!

You can also listen using any number of podcast platforms and apps including Breaker, Pocket Casts, Radio Public, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts.

We’ll be on iTunes soon, but in the meantime, you can add us to the Apple podcast player manually by navigating thusly:

Shows—>Edit—>Add a Podcast by URL—>https://anchor.fm/mommyspen

Show Notes:


Season 1, Episode 1: Inciting Incident

Nora reviews My Name is Victoria, a historical middle grade novel by Lucy Worsley, including her take on the inciting incident of the novel. We also fight about Lucy W.’s eyebrows and whether or not she has the help of a ghostwriter for her novels. (I mean, holy cow, if she doesn’t, this woman is good at everything and insanely productive. She’s also a historian, the Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces in Great Britain and a well known presenter for the BBC.)

We also discuss our plans for the podcast: we’re gonna talk about books, stories, and story structure. Specifically, in each episode we’ll discuss some aspect of story structure. This time around, it’s “inciting incident.” This is an event that thrusts a character into a particular situation and sucks a reader into a story.

Read the full transcript.

Other things we mention that you may want to check out:

  • Our mailing list! Sign up today and you’ll get cool subscriber only perks like bonus material and artwork from my forthcoming novel, The Cat, the Cash, the Leap and the List.
  • The Penderwicks Series by Jeanne Birdsall
  • More from Lucy Worsley at her website, including all her fabulous work with the BBC.
  • If you want to know more about story structure and don’t want to wait for the next podcast, I highly recommend The Story Grid website, book and podcast.

This post was lovingly sponsored by my Patreon supporters (you can become one, too!). 

 

 

Art or Craft?

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In high school, I wrote a fan letter to John Irving, my favorite novelist at the time. I must have asked for some type of writing advice because he wrote back, in part, “Writing isn’t an art, it’s a craft.”

When that shit shows up in your mailbox at age sixteen, you take notice.

I was so grateful to hear it because “artist” has always been a scary label to me.

The word “art” feels out of reach. Being an artist implies one was given a heavy dose of natural talent, originality, and refined sensibility at birth which has no choice but to burst forth throughout one’s life. And you might go crazy or become a drunk from the sheer burden of it.

The thought of making Capital-A-Art paralyzes people (well, people like me anyway) into non-action. Dreams of being an artist stay dreams for so many.

But “to craft” means you pick up a set of tools and work your ass off to learn how to use them properly and create something of use. As a knitter, I get this.

As a beginning knitter — almost twenty years ago — I would never have expected to simply pick and yarn and needles and make a decent sweater with no practice, study or training. The same should be assumed for writing.

But once I got going — both with knitting and with writing — I progressed more quickly than I imagined possible. Soon I could make something pretty serviceable, be it a sweater or a book.

Being a crafter, I need not come up with something new and astonishing. There are no new stories, anyway. Only freshened up stories. I can look around and give myself permission to work with what’s already out there. I take things that feel relevant to me, pull them apart and build something that feels new, satisfying and useful.

Commitment to craft is all that’s required.

Get Unstuck: Two Tools for Creative Types #Day5

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Wouldn’t it be nice if we creative types had an inbox on our desk that was magically filled with definable, executable work? We could sit down, pick something from the stack, bust it out and then sit back, satisfied, smug and creatively fulfilled?

But this is an absurd idea. Creative work is the exact opposite of this.

Our job is to conjure up our own ideas out of thin air and get to work.

Not easy. And hard as hell to sustain.

But it is possible. There are two tools I’ve found that have worked far better than simply sitting around waiting for a visit from the muse.

The first tool is a book. Once I mention it, you’ll start to hear about from every single creative person you respect. I first heard about it from Johnny B. Truant and John Morrow, two impressively productive writers.

It’s called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Crack it open (or better yet, get the audio book so you can absorb it while doing non-creative tasks) and this book will unleash upon you the biggest can of lovingly-dispensed whoop-ass you’ve ever known.

Pressfield defines your enemy: Resistance with a capital R, and sets about telling you what you need to know to deal with it and do your work anyway. Every person who’s taken my advice and actually read this book has kicked off an impressive period of productive creative work before they were even done reading it.

The second tool is a bit nerdy, I admit. But it’s the perfect companion to The War of Art. It was developed by writers for writers and it’s called the Magic Spreadsheet.

It’s basically a gamification strategy for making your word count. Hundreds of writers track their word count on a (free) shared spreadsheet and are rewarded for a consistent writing practice. You get more points for writing everyday than you get for the volume of writing you create, thus helping to create a regular writing practice. And when those points start to add up, and you start to see how much writing you can get done everyday if you’re accountable for it, well, it is indeed magical. 

My personal best streak of two and a half months of writing every single day (June through mid-August of last year) was entirely thanks to the one-two punch of Pressfield and the Magic Spreadsheet. It only ended with the life upheaval that the crippling fatigue of pregnancy’s first trimester can bring. And when you break your streak, you just jump back in and start again.

Go get started right now. Read the book, add your name to the spreadsheet and get to work. You’ll be amazed at what you can do.

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This week I’m doing the #YourTurnChallenge. One blog post a day for seven days. Today is Day 5.