Dreams From My Father: Read like a writer

Tips from a writer…
Woodibee: I’m a speaker, not a writer, but I’ve been told to write a short story. A memoir about my father.
Writer-in-residence: Having problems?
Woodibee: Acute writer’s block. Can’t get started.
Writer-in-residence: Did you read someone else’s memoir? Like say, oh, Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father.”
Woodibee: I've read it. Nice piece of work. Barack’s a great writer as well as a speaker.
Writer-in-residence: So you read it one time, to get the feeling. Then you read it for the structure. See how the wh5 is put together.
Woodibee: wh5?
Writer-in-residence: The what, where, when, who and why leading to the conclusion. That’s not everything though. It’s a like telling a joke. You can’t just tell the punchline. Unveil the story a little at a time, always keeping something back. Keep the reader in suspense.
Woodibee: Character? Dialogue?
Writer-in-residence: These are important. First know the character. Craft a voice. Then the dialogue will flow.
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Voice-over
Read like a writer. Deconstruct what you read. See the craft behind the art.

Luther’s church door as a social media app

Historian and technologist discuss the election:

Historian: Luther began it. He was annoyed at the demands of the Catholic church for funds from the poor people to build a church when the church had plenty of money of its own. So he nailed his “95 theses” to the church door at Wittenburg in protest.

Technologist: And that set off the Reformation. I see a parallel. People protesting using texting in the Philippines against Estrada, the people sending messages in protest in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Power to the people.

Historian: Maybe that church door in Wittenburg was the first social media app.

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Voice-over

Power to the politicians too. In the recent U.S. election, the Democrats used a social media app, Narwhal, to encourage people to vote for them. The Republicans used a similar app, Orca, for the same reason. Narwhal was successful enough, Orca crashed. Did social media swing the election result?

Short film on the move from broadcast media to social media in politics here at:  http://youtu.be/LH9fCzggds4

Obama's victory speech

Authorial interjection

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There are events in history we recall by what we were doing at the time they occurred in our lives. 

I just watched (twice) Barack Obama’s victory speech. I can’t recall being so moved by U.S. politics since a day in 1963 when, on returning from tennis,my mother said, “John Kennedy died.”

Obama stood between flags flying behind him and thousands of cheering people in front of him.

And at the end of his speech, a gracious and pretty gripping speech, he tells a story. Not his own story.

One of a 106-year-old woman in Georgia, Ann Nixon Cooper, who voted.

“Born just a generation past slavery but for many years couldn’t vote for two reasons, because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.”

Symbols which punctuated her life:  “She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We shall overcome.’ Yes we can.”

Then he diverted attention from the race issue.

“A man touched down on the Moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination,'' And then: “And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.”

The president-elect will face problems with the earth, energy, the economy, but at least he knows how to inspire people with stories.

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Voice-over

Telling a story can move crowds but repeating keywords can also pull them along with you.  Did Barack Obama’s speechwriter increase the keyword count using a cloud tagger? America, campaign, change, hope, nation, people. 

And Obama seemed to have learned this victory speech well. No TELETEXT in sight. When did he find time to memorize it? Or was he rehearsing already some months back?

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