So, you want to find your character’s voice. Do you know your character well enough is the question. Do you know anyone well enough to mimic (or picture) their voice? Start with people you know best. Write a dialog with your mom, BFF, or current/former lover. Let them speak about something you hear a lot: […]
Author: alex.koskin
Categories
You’ve Got The Power
You’ve Got The Power to Alex Lin and me They tell me “you’ve got the power”. No, I don’t. I’m here so you can give me the power I need. “No, you’ve got the power.” But I don’t feel it. “You’ve got the power.” Where is it, then? I feel like you’re giving me a […]
Categories
Tools to Start Finishing Things
How to finally start finishing things? All those ideas, unfinished stories or drafts, abandoned books, projects that never saw the light of day, half-baked essays, bits of future poems, unwritten songs, brushes and canvases, harmonicas and guitars collecting dust in the attic. It cripples us — all of us — from time to time. One […]
Categories
Fighting Anger as a Parent
My mother never hit me. My father once poured tea on my head when I refused to taste the honey he brought me, but he never laid his hand on me either. And now, after a year of being a parent, I learned to appreciate my folk’s patience. Toddlers are impossible, they say, but you […]
Categories
Grand Stand-off
There is a age-old tradition in Russia to separate the state and the people. It’s not like the people actively oppose the system, but they do not identify with it. That was how the Russian Empire operated, which is how the Russian Federation is running things right now. Briefly, we have witnessed a union between […]
Categories
Sorry if you’re dead
Louis CK sent me an email. (I’m on his mailing list. We’re not friends. Yet.) It ends with Otherwise, happy new year. Sorry if you’re dead now. At first, I thought how inappropriate and rude that was. Then I thought a bit more. And I concluded that it was inappropriate and rude, but also genius. […]
Categories
The Gospel Of Hard Work
The lead On the table in front of me lies William Zinsser’s On writing well. 30th-anniversary edition. Every book that survived 30 editions and 44 years deserves attention. Especially since it is nonfiction. In 1976 you could name your book about how to write On writing well. Today you apparently can not. Look at the […]
Bright and shiny image of freelance the dream has never been closer I’ve been there. You open a website and there is a bad and lazy article on the first page. Stupid and obvious, watery and empty. What? That guy (or girl) got paid for this crap? Outrageous! Or you open a magazine and read […]
Once upon a time… …there was a little girl. One day her mom told her: “You’re a big girl now. I need to go to the market to sell my flowers and you will stay at home.” And then she left and the little “big girl” was alone for the first time in her life… […]
Categories
5 Harsh Truths About Screenwriting
How to know what you’re getting into How do we know stuff about professions? How can we understand what’s it like to be a lawyer, an engineer, a writer before we get ourselves into it? Well, we have our role models in parents. And their friends. And our friends’ parents. But it’s a close circle. […]