We have another new episode of The Narrative Breakdown* live here at our iTunes page, and it's a really fun one this week:  As the start of a new series on scene construction, screenwriter  Matt Bird joins us to discuss strategies by which characters try to get what they want in a scene. As you know if you follow his blog The Cockeyed Caravan, Matt is a certifiable writing-craft genius, offering terrific tools like "The Ultimate Story Checklist" and essay series on "The Storyteller's Rulebook" and "How to Build a Scene." (And as my kidlit readers might know, he is married to the illustrious Betsy.) He has a TON of terrific ideas and insights to offer on both developing characters and showing their behavior playing out in a scene, and James and I had such a great time talking to him that at one point we ran out of disk space to record our conversation (a mistake we quickly corrected, obviously). Please check it out!
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* A copyediting-dork digression: In writing this, I experienced a brief bit of existential doubt at how The Chicago Manual of Awesome would style something so lowly and unofficial as a podcast. . . . Would it be in roman and quote marks, a la an episode of a TV show? Or all caps, as I've done it before here as per Internet style? Or just a link? I'm going with itals as this is the title of a real show, dammit; and hence it shall be forevermore.