[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: How important are prompts in a writer’s box of tools?
Author/Instructor, Jonathan Blum: I think they are really important. I am a big believer in writing from prompts. One nice story about prompts when I was a student is I had a teacher who gave me a prompt which was write something from the point of view of an unreliable narrator. I ended up developing my answer to that prompt into a story and it ended up being my very first published story. Prompts can lead to stories that are fully realized works that come from prompts. That’s one thing I like about them.
In terms of giving my students prompts which I do every week, I like to give open-ended prompts in which the…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BUY THE BOOK – LAST WORD
BUY THE BOOK – THE USUAL UNCERTAINTIES: STORIES
About:
Jonathan Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of two books of fiction: The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press, 2019), a story collection, and Last Word (Rescue Press, 2013), a novella. Both were named one of the best books of the year by Iowa Public Radio, and The Usual Uncertainties was named one of the 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2019 by Electric Literature. Blum has twice appeared on KCRW’s Bookworm. His short stories have been published in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Northwest Review, Playboy, and Shanxi Literature, among others. His short story, “The White Spot,” which was published in Electric Literature with an introduction by Deborah Eisenberg, appears in the award-winning anthology The Best Peace Fiction (University of New Mexico Press, 2021). He has taught fiction writing at The University of Iowa, Drew University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. He has also been a guest writer at the Tianjin Binhai New Area International Writing Program in China. He lives in Los Angeles.
WRITING CLASSES WITH JONATHAN BLUM
Jonathanblumwriter.com/classes
CONNECT WITH JONATHAN BLUM
Advertisement – contains affiliate links
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases)
More affiliates:
Camera we use for interviews – https://buff.ly/3rWqrra
Sound we use for interviews – https://amzn.to/2tbFlM9
Other books on Amazon that Film Courage recommends – https://buff.ly/3o0oE5o
