There’s been a lot of buzz about book summary services lately.
Services like Blinkist do an excellent job at this. They take a classic non-fiction title like The Four-Hour Work Week, read it from cover-to-cover, distil it, distil it again, and out pops a summary in as many as 10 bitesize points, or ‘Blinks’.
People in a hurry feel like they lack the time to sit down and read a book. They barely get five minutes to themselves at home, how are they supposed to dedicate their undivided attention to words on a page for hours at a time?
Much has been written on burnout and the culture of overworking. It’s not uncommon knowledge that it’s unhealthy, and top companies are taking positive steps to keep their valuable staff happy and healthy at work.
Along comes a service like Blinkist offering thousands of non-fiction titles that can be digested in 10 minutes as opposed to the typical three hours of reading, and the overworked professional sees a no-brainer. “$60 a year to get as many books as I want? Hell yes.”
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This post is a list of my favourite books on storytelling. The first few in the list are my top picks and highly recommended to all storytellers. There is also a list of honourable mentions that are worth checking out.
In each case, I have provided a convenient link to Amazon where you can instantly pick up the books and see for yourself how useful they are. Full disclosure: Some of them are affiliate links that help me to run my free storytelling newsletter for you.
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“A dialogue is very important. It is a form of communication in which question and answer continue till a question is left without an answer. Thus the question is suspended between the two persons involved in this answer and question. It is like a bud with untouched blossoms... If the question is left totally untouched by thought, it then has its own answer because the questioner and answerer, as persons, have disappeared. This is a form of dialogue in which investigation reaches a certain point of intensity and depth, which then has a quality that thought can never reach.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
It’s no secret that directors like Quentin Tarantino are masters of dialogue in film. His tension-filled scenes have become the iconic examples of how to use dialogue in storytelling.
But how is he able to create such great dialogue? What are the steps we can take to recreate the work of this master?
In this post I hope to give you some tips on how to construct witty, entertaining dialogue that doesn’t bore and doesn’t rely on exposition.
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Obvious Star Wars: The Last Jedi spoilers follow. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it.
The Last Jedi is my favourite Star Wars film in the modern saga, and twice as good as The Force Awakens.
It’s a film drenched in pain, regret, and shame, embodying a theme of redemption in the face of failure.
Is it perfect? No.
But I loved it from it start to finish, and it affected me deeply on an emotional level.
In fact, I think it will go down in history in the same regard as The Empire Strikes Back, a masterpiece with which it draws strong parallels.
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