I’d like to recommend a couple of literary podcasts that I’ve listened to recently. The first is Pilar Alessandra’s interview with Corey Mandell that can be found on Pilar’s popular screenwriting podcast, On the Page (item no. 2 via this link). Screenwriters of course will be most interested in this one, especially the story Corey tells about the very different reactions he received to his first script, one from one of his teachers at UCLA, and the other from a manager in the industry. But writers of all kinds will learn something from Corey’s remarks at the beginning of the podcast about “conceptual” and “intuitive” writers. Corey believes that writers incline naturally to one of these characterizations, but they can mature in their writing by “writing toward” the other characterization. I know intuitively that I am a conceptual writer by inclination (“Let’s begin with a 50-page outline of the plot!”), and so am practicing these days writing more intuitively. (For more on this theme, see this earlier post, “The Problem of the Next Line.” Unfortunately the YouTube clip in the post is now defunct but I still think the post is valuable.)
Over the weekend I also enjoyed Joanna Penn’s interview with A.J. Hartley, professor of Shakespearean Studies at the University of North Carolina and author of a new thriller adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, that you can find on The Creative Penn Podcast. Here’s what I wrote on Joanna’s blog about the interview:
“Thanks, Joanna, for this very engaging interview with A.J. Hartley–which I listened to, as I often do with your podcasts, while cleaning the bathroom on a Saturday afternoon. As a former academic myself (PhD philosophy), self-published author of a (comic) thriller, and an amateur actor who last fall played the title role in my local community theater’s production of Macbeth, the interview happily rang several bells with me. A couple of things I thought might come up in the interview, however, didn’t come up and I thought I might mention them here:
“First, how snugly Macbeth, i.e. Shakespeare’s play, itself falls into the thriller genre. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy and is quite fast-paced and exciting even on the page. And with its themes of revenge, murder, and demonic possession, it is easy to think of it as a thriller of its day. I believe this is how Shakespeare meant it to be taken and how his Elizabethan audiences took it. I’m sure A.J. and David Hewson had all this very much in mind when they chose to pursue their adaptation of the story. A more general point related to this: especially when it comes to Shakespeare, I think it’s a mistake to think of him as “high-brow” or “up-market” or “literary,” as opposed to today’s popular genre fiction. We unfortunately tend to think of Shakespeare’s work as set in amber, but in its day it was enormously popular and in many respects as “genre” as you please. This is important to remember, I think, because it keeps us from assuming that popular books cannot deal with substantial philosophical, even theological themes. Think of Graham Greene’s thriller writing, for example.
“Second, I would have loved to have heard more about how A.J. has been so successful in securing the likes of Alan Cumming and Richard Armitage, A-list acting talents, to read his audio books. I know the publishing house did the heavy lifting in securing them, but still, those two are not your garden-variety voice artists and I would love to have heard how it all happened.
“Thanks again for a wonderful interview and congratulations to A.J. I’m also delighted to report that my bathroom is now sparkling clean!”
And what have I been reading?
Lately, lots of plays: Waiting for Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Hapgood, The Dog It Was That Died, The Real Inspector Hound.
Some of Yeats’s poetry.
And just last night I started the only Evelyn Waugh novel that I haven’t yet read, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. I won’t comment on it yet, except to say that in returning to Waugh after a lengthy hiatus I am exhilarated (again) by the structure of his sentences. As someone once said about him, Waugh seemed incapable of writing a bad sentence.
Anyone out there a Goodreads fan? I’m gearing up to reboot my Goodreads page, including linking this blog to it. Please stop on by!
Meanwhile, let me know what you’ve been reading, listening to, and working on.
(And yes, the above pic is of me after one of the performances last fall of our company’s Macbeth).
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