Loving-Change Storytelling

Here are the latest additions to our Liberatory Craft Library! Craft tools, inspiration, & insights for building our next world, now. Some just remembered, some newly discovered.

📖 Books

👉 Brian Richardson’s Unnatural voices: extreme narration in modern and contemporary fiction (Open access)

“Narrative theory, despite its emphasis on narration and narrators, has not yet systematically examined the impressive range of unusual postmodern and other avant garde strategies of narration.”

👉 Erin James & Eric Morel’s Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology (Open access)

“Two simple premises lie at the heart of this edited collection of original essays: first, that stories about the environment significantly influence experiences of that environment, and vice versa, and second that scholars can do a much better job of understanding those stories and suggesting alternatives.”

👉 Kate McCullough’s Never on Time, Always in Time: Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium (Open access)

“In this book, I explore how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses: these experiences have
much to tell us about the pasts, presents, and futures of queer life. I am interested in how narrative form and techniques represent queer senses in order to open a more expansive temporality for writers and readers.”

👉 Natalya Bekhta’s We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction (Open access)

“Plural narration, performed by a group itself, gives rise to a new narrative situation: we-narrative. By tracing we-narrative’s distinctive elements and effects, I propose to make available a mode of narratological analysis that illuminates the existence in narrative fiction of this structurally and compositionally plural, collective way of telling.”

👉 Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd Edition)

“In short, the author’s judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it. Whether its particular forms are harmful or serviceable is always a complex question, a question that cannot be settled by any easy reference to abstract rules. As we begin now to deal with this question, we must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear.”

📜 Articles

👉 Doc Burford’s ‘“lore” is a trap and will kill your story if you let it. So what can we do about it?‘

“Lore is appealing because it is the easiest thing there is to do in any kind of storytelling process. You think “why is this place like this?” “how did we get here?” “what do people call bread?” and so on, and it’s all very easy to come up with cool and interesting deviations from reality as we know it. But lore isn’t a story. It’s barely even storytelling.”

👉 Doc Burford’s ‘I was a teenage exocolonist (and so can you)’

“So you might have written a piece of comfy, cozy, escapist fiction, and you’re hoping it’ll convince people to be better people, but their reasoning for consuming your fiction was to avoid being confronted, which means that if your fiction confronts them in some way, they might get hostile, because they aren’t here for a lesson about acceptance and caring; they’re here to be pampered.”

📺 Audio Visual

👉 Lucas Alpay on ‘“Show, Don’t Tell” Was Never Meant for Novelists’

“If you are drafting a novel and want to learn granular writing craft, this video breaks down the exact moments when telling flat-out beats showing.”

👉 Matt Golding interviewed by Rachel Donald on ‘The power of stories’

“The foundations of our cultural narrative and the foundations of our story archetypes in our culture do not really aid you in telling positive stories of collectively how we can change the world. So, what I’m doing at the moment is running this project called Antidote, which aims to reshape the way we tell collective action stories to help ordinary people believe that together we can change the world.”

👉 Tali Faulkner, interviewed by Patrick Klepeck on ‘Penguin Colony and the Real-Life Politics of Adapting Lovecraft’

“In the just general games landscape you know the amount of games that are made with like overt um sort of right-wing narratives…”