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How to turn your pain and fear and joy and triumphs into viral stories.
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Everything I read and consumed in this week fit into one theme: How everything is useful for you, fuel for. So let’s talk about that. In particular let’s talk about how:
You Will Use It All.
I found this idea in Stephen King’s On Writing, which I read this week because seemingly every writer I know had. King relays an anecdote about getting all these rejections slips as a young writer from magazines where he’d looked to publish his short stories. The rejections piled up so high that he quit pinning them to his wall and eventually drove a large nail through to better accommodate the notes that said, “Sorry we’ll pass.”
He thought he could defy these notes: I’ll prove you all wrong! Instead he learned to channel the despair he felt when he stared at the rejection slips into a vulnerability on the page, which his new characters embodied. Soon after, his first stories were accepted.
Kate Winslet’s insecurities led her to an opposition conclusion. When she was young and breaking into London’s acting scene she did so amid classically trained performers whose education far outpaced Winslet’s. Her beauty had afforded her roles, in, say, Titanic, but that beauty had deprived her of…
