Category Archives: Writing

Book Review of Pete Seeger’s “Story Telling Book”

Book Review, Writing

One of the first things I did when I decided to publish my book was acquire a bunch of books about writing and publishing.  In this frenzy, I picked up Pete Seeger’s “Story Telling Book” composed by Pete Seeger & Paul Dubois Jacobs.  It is a strange book.  I thought it would be about the craft of story telling.  Instead, it is  a book of stories to tell to children.  The bulk of the book is short stories, mostly already known, suitable for children with endnotes about how to make the story more compelling or creative (use scary voices, swap “boy” for “girl”).  Fairly frequently the story is modified from the original to emphasize values such as working together.

The book is divided in 6 sections.

Stories from my father- Family history type stories with tips on how to exaggerate the details to make them more compelling and stories that Pete Seeger’s father told him when he was a child.

New versions of old stories- retellings and modifications of old stories such as stories from the bible or fairy tales like “stone soup”

Stories from Sounds, Rounds, and lullabyes-  Stories that fill in the details about events described in songs.

Stories from American History-  This has both more family history stories and stories about legendary people’s lives

A few of my own stories- The only fully original stories in the book.  There is a lot of magical elements in both stories from my father and this section- talking lightbulbs and telephone lines for example.  They struck me as fairly formulaic, but I  guess that is the point of the book- formulas so you can be a storyteller?  To be fair, I did find the stories compelling enough that I read the book in a single sitting.  This may have made the formulas more obvious…

Story Beginnings- The first bit of a story- the rest of the story is left up to the reader.  Some are original (to Seeger or his father) while some are well-known (Goldilocks).

Okay, first, clearly this book is of no use to me and my quest to publish my book.  It has 8 fairly glowing reviews on Amazon from parents who have retold the stories to their children to much acclaim.  If you are looking to freshen up story hour, this might be the book for you.  If you already have stories bursting out of your head, and regularly use your “monster voice”  or “princess voice” as the story requires, you can probably safely pass on this one.

Being a writer

habits, Writing

I’m a writer.  I write technical documents for work and volumes of personal musings for myself.  I’ve also written a book-  50,000 words slammed together a decade ago as part of National Novel Writing Month.  I’ve never read it.  Writing the book was a project- a temporary endeavor.  When I accomplished the goal, the project was done, and I filed the book away as “complete”.

But lately I’ve been thinking about my book lately in the context of habits and goals.  The end point- writing X number of words by the end of November- isn’t the natural endpoint of a book.  It is at best a midpoint.  Next comes editing, workshopping, ???  I actually have no idea.  National Novel Writing Month was a huge amount of fun.  More importantly, it provided a framework (write X words in X time) that was easy to follow and easy to win. (Yes, I like to win.  No, that isn’t the point of NaNoWriMo.  Writing that much in a month is tough, but the endpoint is so close and so clear, it is pretty easy to power through to the end.

There is a lot of contradictory information out there about what to do next.  So,  I thought I would document my experience as I complete my book.  I’ll be looking at a lot of different resources ranging from traditional books to Reddit.  I’ll post my reviews of the resources here on the blog, and I’ll also let you know how things go as I progress.  I hope that this blog will be a useful resource for others when they decide to publish their books as well.

Along the way, I’ll digress and talk about habits, productivity, “side hustles”, and whatever else I try to apply to my life.   The end goal is a peaceful, productive, and creative life.  Getting there might be rocky, but hopefully I’ll find some tips and tricks that can make the next person’s life a bit smoother.

The Start…

Starting, Writing

A new year.  A new start.  A stack of resolutions.  By January 3, are you already drowning under the weight of these expectations?

Goals can be a worthy thing.  Grounded in self-compassion and kindness, they can help us become better, richer, wiser people.  Approached rigidly, they can be punitive and crushing- making us smaller, sadder, ‘failures’.

So take small steps and expect failure, but embrace that you took action.  The start is frequently the hardest part…

More concretely, the goal of starting a blog is a huge thing.  WordPress is baffling.  Writing is intimidating.  Time to write is elusive.

But here is the first post anyway.