Chris Jones: Storytelling is magic

Jones compares storytelling to the seven principles of magic, giving narrative newcomers and veterans alike a fresh way to think about the craft. Watch him give his talk — and perform a magic trick.

Chris Jones is a writer-at-large for Esquire and a back-page columnist for ESPN: The Magazine. This is his opening keynote for The Power of Storytelling conference in 2013, in Bucharest, Romania.

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

The Guardian publishes an excerpt from a lecture by Neil Gaiman explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens:

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

George R.R. Martin on readers

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin

— iA Writer (@iAWriter) October 6, 2013

Worthwhile Stories

Simon Sinek's newsletter:  

Stories are attempts to share our values and beliefs. Story telling is only worthwhile when it tells what we stand for, not what we do.

Making Magic with Pixar: Maker Camp Field Trip 2013

Maker Camp, a six-week virtual summer camp for teens, wrapped with a Google Hangout field trip to Pixar that includes great insights from Pixar University and a live Q&A with Pixar designers.