A new story up this week on my storytelling page, Tell Your True Tale, is by convicted bank robber Jeffrey Scott Hunter.
Check out Wasn’t About the Money — Jeff’s story of the time he knew his bank robbing was getting out of hand.
Happy to read any story you might want to submit.
And please share it on any social media you might use….
Many thanks,
Sam
Filed under Culture, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
Salon has an article on novelists using software programs to deny themselves access to the Internet.
This is what I need. I wrote my second book — Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream — in a cafe mercifully before the era of Wi-Fi hookups.
My focus was deep, as I listened to music via headphones and wrote for 5-6 hours at a time for weeks. I remember reaching profound levels of concentration doing that.
Now, Wi-Fi allows us to cut away at any moment when the writing gets tough. Very frustrating and counterproductive.
This week on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale, a new story by Angelino writer Julian Segura Camacho.
Check out Being Saved – the story of how a young man from Inglewood was asked to convert to evangelical Christianity.
I’m very eager to read more submissions, so if you’ve got an inner writer, write a story of your own and send it in.
Hey folks —
There’s a new story up on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling page.
Southern California writer David Chittenden contributes “Climbing the Mesa.” Cool piece.
You can also read the story Huffington Post recently used,which I posted to TYTT a few months ago.
My First Bank Robbery is by federal prison inmate Jeffrey Scott Hunter about his, you guessed it, first bank robbery.
Again, I’m always interested in submissions to the site. I do edit, don’t pay, and love good true stories. So get writing and send one in….
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
The Huffington Post has re-posted one of the stories that I put up earlier this year on my storytelling site, Tell 
Your True Tale.
It’s by convicted bank robber, Jeffrey Scott Hunter. My First Bank Robbery is the title of the tale.
You can see more cool stories at Tell Your True Tale.
Read ’em, share ’em, send in one of your own. I’m always looking for good stories.
Filed under Prison, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale, Writing
There’s a great appreciation of Ray Bradbury, who died yesterday at 91, by Scott Timberg in Zocalo.
In it, among other things, Timberg wonders why it was California where science fiction writers flourished. He concludes that it was because there was no literary elite or hierarchy to disapprove of the genre.
Reminds me of Tijuana in the 1950s through the 1980s, where lots of poor people could join the middle class because there was no wealthy class controlling opportunity as there was in the long-established cities of Mexico’s interior.
Timberg sees a California vibe in Bradbury’s stories about Martians, and notes the author was a young autograph hound, with no college education, who wrote his first stuff on butcher paper, and Fahrenheit 451 on a UCLA library typewriter into which he had to keep pumping dimes.
“Libraries raised me,” Bradbury is quoted as saying. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.”
Timberg writes the MisreadCity blog.
Filed under California, Los Angeles, Storytelling, Writing
One thing I’ve learned is that you can always count on something hip at the blog written by C.M. Mayo.
Here, she talks about writing an essay on the legends surrounding Maximilian, the Austrian emperor that Mexico imported to rule it for a few years in the 1800s — which has to be itself one of the weirdest chapters in the history of any country.
Then they set him before a firing squad and that was that. Except that his body was embalmed and put on display for a while. His wife, Carlotta, died many decades later.
I’m hoping C.M. writes that essay, since in the duel between legend and fact, legend is usually more interesting. In another life, she was an economist who wrote a lot about informal methods of savings/finance. Now she does other stuff.
Meanwhile, check out the C.M. Mayo blog.
Filed under Culture, Storytelling, Writing
What are your writing commandments?
As I prepare to head off to the Tucson Festival of Books tomorrow, I feel like returning to the basics of writing that are always so refreshingly simple.
My colleague Martin Beck passed on writing commandments from Brit George Orwell, which you can read here.
Ad man legend David Ogilvy has these commandments. I particularly like his view that writing is not a God-given ability, but a craft that anyone can learn.
Novelist Henry Miller chimes in with these 11 commandments.
It’s wonderful how similar they all are.
So again I ask, What are your writing commandments?
I hope it won’t sound too presumido to say that any Sam Quinones Commandments would include, in no particular order:
-Read a lot — above all On Writing Well, By William Zinsser, and Calvin Trillin, too (& Bob Baker, my former LAT colleague).
-If your story isn’t working, you need to report more.
-Cut as many words with Latin roots as possible. “Problematize” is a word I once saw somewhere. (Yikes!)
-Remember the difference between “that” and “which”
-Never use the word “ongoing” and be very careful whenever using “process” with an adjective, e.g. “the writing process” (Yikes!)
-Remove adjectives whenever possible. Adverbs, too.
-The ending is at least as important as the beginning.
-Leave the office. Now.
