Launched This Week: January 17th-20th
A roundup of stories from our week together at Catapult.
As a kid, I’d devoured books about General Relativity, black holes, wormholes, pulsars, exoplanets—anything far away and foreign. I had gone into astronomy because I was interested in objects and places and scales that dwarfed me. But now, I was dwarfed by nothing except the “Assistant” in front of my title. I—we, me and Lisa—had turned into accountants or insurance adjusters, manipulating mere columns of numbers for a living.
I looked into her brown eyes, which I loved for the pattern etched into their color.
“I used to love Mars,” I said. “Now I never think about it.”
“Alternating ecstasy and despair characterize resident life in particular, and medical practice in general.”
Border Tapestry
“When I started here about a year ago, I didn’t think people could get so worked up about cable TV.”
We published another short story from the flawless archives of NOON: “Today’s Story,” by Susan Laier.
Finally, I chatted with writer and Catapult instructor Scott O’Connor about series treatments, screenplays, and fiction:
Writing treatments and writing for television has really helped me to learn that you can tell a story in any number of ways. Adapting your own novel for television means trying to tell it in another way; it’s like taking a new road, a different highway into the city, when you’ve always taken the same road in the past.
I told the story in my novel in a very particular way, and I’m happy with that, but if I want to tell the story for television then I have to tell it differently . . . I’ve had to ask myself the same question I ask when writing any other treatment: How can I best tell this story for television? There is more than one way, hopefully, to tell a good story.
Nicole Chung is the author of All You Can Ever Know, a national bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the new memoir A Living Remedy. Find her on Twitter: @nicolesjchung
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