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Can We Dispense the Myth about King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Passage?
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Every time we commemorate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, we talk about the co-called “I Have a Dream” oration at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. The speech is certainly worthy of the praise, as I explore in my book Nobody Turn Me Around. Some other King speeches were…
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Haskell Wexler’s Lesson for Writers: Gather Lots and Lots of Materials … And Only Then, Organize and Write Your Piece
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Maybe the greatest challenge of writing is what comes before writing: gathering materials. Often, we are so eager to put words to paper that we start drafting before we have the necessary materials — stories, portraits, facts, definitions, background information, and so on. We begin with a topic and then start to write what…
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The Power of Artifacts in Storytelling: Put Something in Your Character’s Hands
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When you watch a great period television show or movie, it’s always fun to see the artifacts that help to revive bygone periods in history. Every prop reveals something about the characters, their community and culture. Artifacts being us into a particular time and place. The objects say something about the values of the characters. Holding a…
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Seven Essential Skills for Storytelling
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People are storytelling creatures. We evolved to tell stories. From 30,000 to 100,000 years ago, out great ancestors began telling stories. It happened around the time that the size of clans expanded and those clans began to wander longer distances and then come home again. Sitting by fires or in caves, by streams or…
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The Power of Patterns
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Man is a pattern-seeking animal. To understand anything—from brewing coffee in the morning to understanding Trevor Noah’s jokes at night—we need to see patterns. When we “get” the pattern, we can understand complexity within the pattern. The catchier we can make the pattern, the easier it is for the reader to follow along—and get…