Start With This
Night Vale PresentsStart With This
The creators of Welcome to Night Vale Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink believe the only bad writing is not writing. Start With This is a podcast gone creativity playground designed to put your ideas in motion. Each episode centers around a writing topic. Then they give listeners two short assignments: something to consume and something to create. Make something—anything. Then make something else.
The creators of Welcome to Night Vale Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink believe the only bad writing is not writing. Start With This is a podcast gone creativity playground designed to put your ideas in motion. Each episode centers around a writing topic. Then they give listeners two short assignments: something to consume and something to create. Make something—anything. Then make something else.
At its core, a game is a set of fun rules. From acrostic poems to following mathematical progressions, games can take the pressure off of creating and let you have fun making your art. Jeffrey and Joseph talk about the idea of games in creative work, how playing them can provide instant structure, and how watching someone attempt to succeed is instantly captivating.
Author and poet Sarah Griffin joins us to talk about how the awareness of an audience affects our writing.
Burnout is real and it comes around on the regular.
Writing more with less
How do you land the ending?
Elevating basic language to something special.
There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure.
They say that podcasting has a low barrier to entry. Wtf does that even mean?
What makes a good tease? Listen and find out.
It's easy to dislike something, but much harder to do it well.
Just follow these simple rules and something something...
What makes something weird, and is that a good thing?
Mightly push your powerful writing to the top of the highest of literary peaks! Or… work on your craft.
Good artists borrow; great artists steal. What? Let's break this down.
Getting there is 1/x the fun!
You’re a writer, because you write. Don’t tell yourself otherwise.
Celebrating the act of daily creation with Jonathan Mann.
Stop and describe the roses.
There's so much more to horror, we couldn't stop at Lovecraft.
Lovecraft was a racist and a bad writer, yet his ideas and his stories live on. So what do we do with them?
A character has a problem. As a result of that problem, they make a decision. As a result of that decision, they change.
Fiction is a lie. Hopefully a good, fun lie.
What do you need to set the scene
It's all in the title.
Other than sight, how are you describing your world?
What do you sound like, as a writer?
You write in the here and now.
You are intrigued by second person narratives.
What's there that's not there?
What is the shape of your narrative?
How are you doing?
How strong is your satire?
Writing what's absurd.
When do you use stage directions, and how descriptive do you get?
It's okay - and sometimes exciting - to fail.
Writing for a single voice
Is writer's block real?
What does it mean to tell your story honestly?
Amid all your fine prose, don't forget you need to tell a story.
Writing for a live audience presents new challenges.
Outlining your story is like a puzzle for plot.
We talk a lot about creating with enough speed to turn writing into habit, but working slowly puts the finish line so far out of sight that you can focus on something other than the final outcome. Slowness is a way to make something big by allowing you to break your writing down into manageable parts, and gives you enough space to enjoy the process. It also means you can work a little bit on something everyday, even if you don’t know what it is yet.
Your writing needs a message. The way you deliver this message is up to you. Repetition is one way to get this message across. There’s almost a magic power in centering on a message, spiraling outward, and circling back to the message again and again. In this episode, we talk about using repetition to review an idea, create rhythm, reinforce comprehension, drive emphasis, and to disorient.
In writing, words are you currency. So how can you maximize your spending on a budget? In this episode, we talk about how word counts can break up longer projects into achievable goals, are a form of accountability in your own process, and influence how your audience perceives your work. Plus, we discuss how knowing your own voice will help you decide how many words you want to dedicate to describing something in great detail or with great efficiency.
Working quickly means you can create faster than your doubt. In this episode, we talk about how using speed as a writing technique can be freeing and helpful. From setting timers to making word counts, writing without pausing allows you to simply get your ideas out now for you to shape later.
Stereo is a powerful, audio-specific tool that can fill out a sound in the same way that we experience sound in the world. We talk about how using stereo wisely can invite your listener’s imagination to get involved by differentiating speaking voices, putting them in a specific setting, and by creating weird or unexpected moments.
There will always be something to improve about your writing, but you can’t revise forever. We talk about developing processes so you know what to improve, how to improve it, and when to finish punching up your piece.
Have you ever had a big deadline and all of a sudden you have to listen to that new audiobook? In this episode, we talk about how anxiety about your writing can lead to moments like this. Then we discuss ways to motivate yourself from steering into the skid, to doing achievable tasks, as well as how taking care of your body and mind affects your creative work.
The heart of a good podcast isn’t in expensive mics or a nice studio— it’s in the idea. We talk through four litmus tests to test the strength of your idea: specificity, novelty, practicality, and repeatability. Honing in on these elements will help you uncover what’s exciting about your idea, and what will make it successful. While this episode focuses on podcasting, these tests are good to consider for any artistic idea.
Here’s a short preview of our second members-only bonus Q&A episode.
Poetry can be intimidating. It’s more technical than prose, and there’s an extensive world of theory and study behind it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t play around with it in your writing, and even be good at it! In this episode, Jeffrey and Joseph talk about how we naturally use poetic elements in our everyday speech, and how it can lend structure to get to the heart of what you’re describing.
We think the joy of a podcast is the personal relationship you develop with the podcasters you listen to. It’s a unique medium that creates a listening experience just for you. This direct line of communication is a tool, a gift, and a responsibility. In this episode, we talk about how to create while being aware of the listener's presence.
Silence can be terrifying— Any moment that you’re not creating sound can feel a moment when you’re not keeping your listener’s attention. But silence is incredibly attention grabbing, and if done right can be one of the most valuable tools in any artist’s arsenal. Jeffrey and Joseph talk about how, at its core, silence is a structural element of audio, and how using it adjusts your sense of time, tension, and lends rhythm to your work.
When do you let a project go, and why might you want to move on in the first place? Jeffrey and Joseph discuss the fine line between knowing when to trash a project and when to recycle it into something new. The willingness to let go of the art you consume and create can be really freeing. Thinking of art as truly disposable might even encourage you to try a new medium that you may not be as familiar with.
Writing dialogue can be daunting because you can’t rely own your own narrative voice— the characters have to speak for themselves. Joseph and Jeffrey deconstruct the popular advice that every line of dialogue has to move the plot forward, to talk instead about how the best dialogue is the kind that serves your story.
How can you create something with only the most bare elements? There’s a lot you can do with just a story, a microphone, and a voice. Jeffrey and Joseph talk about the virtues of single-voice narrators, budgeting, and how to make a podcast or any kind of art in its most direct and affordable form.
Jeffrey and Joseph talk the history of their collaboration, and how working together made them better writers in their own right. Then they discuss the qualities they’re attracted to in potential collaborators, and the value they’ve found in working together.
Jeffrey and Joseph answer listener questions for Episode 1 (Idea to Execution) and Episode 2 (Know Your Limitations). Join the SWT Membership community to gain access to this full episode, to ask your own questions, and see what other listeners are making.
Our art is personal so sometimes receiving feedback can feel overwhelming. In this episode, Jeffrey and Joseph talk about how to give and receive comments beyond “it was good,” or “it was bad.” They outline four steps to help get and give useful responses: give permission, set specific parameters, have a limit, and evaluate what was helpful.
How do you deal with the limitation of an inherently audio-only medium? Jeffrey and Joseph discuss how artistic restrictions and resource limitations can become advantages that help you jumpstart a new creative path.
There’s natural talent, and then there’s practice. You can only control that last bit. Joseph and Jeffrey talk building habits of creation so that starting projects gets into your muscle memory.
Normally, creators of Welcome to Night Vale Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink are the ones turning their ideas into stories. But for this podcast, it’s you who will do the writing, one short and simple assignment at a time.
Playing Games
May 31, 201954min 38sec
At its core, a game is a set of fun rules. From acrostic poems to following mathematical progressions, games can take the pressure off of creating and let you have fun making your art. Jeffrey and Joseph talk about the idea of games in creative work, how playing them can provide instant structure, and how watching someone attempt to succeed is instantly captivating.
Consume: Episode 49 “Re: The Moon” of the podcast, Imaginary Advice
Create: Play the game that Ross Sutherland sets up in this episode of Imaginary Advice, “Re: The Moon.” Create three different statements about the moon following the convention, “The moon is a [adjective] [noun].” The adjectives and nouns can’t come from you. Flip through a book, use a random word generator, or use some other source. Then use those statements as the first sentence of three different paragraphs that tell a story.
Join the SWT Membership community to see what other listeners are making: https://www.patreon.com/startwiththis
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Credits: Jeffrey Cranor (host) & Joseph Fink (host), Julia Melfi (producer), Grant Stewart (editor), Vincent Cacchione (mixer). Rob Wilson (logo). Produced by Night Vale Presents.
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