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We were thrilled to sit down with Book Writing World alum Gretchen Atwood to discuss her newly released book, Lost Champions: Four Men, Two Teams, and the Breaking of Pro Football’s Color Line, and get some great tips about balancing research and writing, evaluating and choosing your sources, making use of research to create scene, and where the line between imagination and invention falls in nonfiction. Gretchen gave us a terrific breakdown of pulling details from a variety of sources to create a single, rich scene. She talked about writing a book proposal and finding an agent, about narrative structure and the ways that the research did and didn’t change the book from the way it was described in the proposal. She talked about working with a developmental editor, about various note-taking and color-coding strategies and their limitations, and about taking an emotional v. an analytical approach to building your book. We even got into the parallels between the structure of a ball game and the structure of a book.
Send us your questions about writing and the writing life to questions@storymakersshow.com
Links We Discussed:
Come see Elizabeth in conversation with author Gayle Forman:
WSJ article on Lost Champions:
Peanuts by Charles Schulz http://www.peanuts.com/
Gretchen Atwood
Lea Page has mentored Steiner-Waldorf homeschooling mothers for a decade and has many years experience as a La Leche League leader. She and her husband homeschooled both their children in rural Montana. Lea has studied education, literature and leadership. She now lives and writes in New Hampshire.
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.