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It was an honor and a joy to sit down (virtually) with Jabari Asim and talk about just how a man with five children and a big deal job manages to be so productive across so many genres. Hint: write in your head when you can’t sit down; write on trains, write by hand, start in the middle, and marshall what you might consider a “not great attention span” into a tremendous breadth of work–fiction, non-fiction, plays, poetry, children’s books and journalism, with a past stint in screenwriting. He advocated a “noncommittal investigation” as a useful approach to writing about potentially explosive topics, and talked about the “counter-narrative work” that a lot of writers of color, women, gay writers, etc. do, how to break from the master narrative and the ways it’s about power, not race. Other rich threads of conversation include: the three readers he keeps in mind as he’s writing, listening to your characters and developing them, using omniscience and cinematic techniques in the novel, plot, the separation of politics and art, theme, visualizing your published book, and balancing humility and editing. He had great advice as an editor for those submitting to magazines and journals, and more great advice on writing children’s books. This is an episode not to miss!
Links:
Marsha Hayles – Breathing Room
Jabari Asim
JABARI ASIM is an associate professor at Emerson College, where he directs the MFA program in creative writing. He is also the Executive Editor of The Crisis magazine, a preeminent journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1910. He is the author of 12 books, including The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, And Why, What Obama Means: For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future, A Taste Of Honey: Stories and Only The Strong, a novel. His books for children include Whose Toes Are Those?, Fifty Cents And A Dream, and Preaching To The Chickens, forthcoming in October.
His reviews, essays and cultural criticism have been published in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, the Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post and Essence Magazine, among others.
His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, the Carter G. Woodson Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, a Jefferson Cup Honor from the Virginia Library Association, and two NAACP Image Award nominations.
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.
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