The Strange Case of Sherman Alexie

I was once asked to give a talk about storytelling to a convention of high school media students with Native-American writer Sherman Alexie. The problem was no one told Sherman, so he spoke the entire time. That worked out perfectly for me because I got a great story out of it.Sherman doesn’t believe in formalized story structure, he believes that it is a Hollywood construct. He began his

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We Live in the Dark Ages part 2

The more I talk about, and teach, structure the more I see that people have a fundamental misunderstanding about what it really is. Story structure is not an edict from on high, which says, ‘One must tell stories like this!’ It is more basic than that – it is the way people naturally tell stories. And storytelling is as natural to human beings as language itself.Here are the three parts of

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