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The Burnt Notebook

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The Burnt Notebook

By: Ross Sutherland
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About this listen

Inspirational hacks to transform expand your imagination and your creative writing.

Writer and podcaster Ross Sutherland offers you a suite of writing techniques to get your creative juices flowing. This series is packed with tips gleaned from literature's finest writers, but don't worry - Ross isn't about to ask you to write a dense novel or an academic text. Through a series of playful exercises he's encouraging you to have fun, to experiment, to play and to fall in love with the written word.

A Novel production for Audible Originals.

This is an Audible Original Podcast. Free for members. You can download all 6 episodes to your Library now.

©2019 Audible, Ltd. (P)2019 Audible, Ltd. Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing
Episodes
  • Ep. 1: Anyone Can Form a Band

    Ep. 1: Anyone Can Form a Band
    Jan 2 2020

    Ross encourages us to harness the power of aliases. We learn about Frances Pessoa, a writer with 75 pseudonyms, and we found an imaginary band and populate their world.

    The Exercise:

    1. Imagine a fictional band and pick a name for them
    2. Give your band a desirable quality you admire but don’t have
    3. Sketch out a brief profile of the band referring to their desirable quality
    4. Name your fictional band’s first single and first EP or album
    5. Come up with the track titles for the songs on your imaginary band’s first album
    6. Take one of the song titles and write the lyrics to that song
    7. The end result is a brand new piece of writing you can use to spark new ideas
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    34 mins
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  • Ep. 2: Invisible People

    Ep. 2: Invisible People
    Jan 2 2020

    Ross heads out to do some serious people watching. We learn about the many ways the great authors observed the people around them and we try an exercise that uses strangers to spark our imagination.

    The Exercise:

    1. Find somewhere to sit - a public place with lots of people streaming past
    2. Start people watching and quickly scribble down as much as you can about what they’re wearing
    3. When they walk out of site just stop and pick another person
    4. Enjoy the feeling of just writing without needing to think about what to write
    5. You can use the little details you notice to form an army of potential characters to work into your creative writing
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    37 mins
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  • Ep. 3: Playtime

    Ep. 3: Playtime
    Jan 2 2020

    Ross teaches us to listen to words in a new way by forcing them into unusual formations. We discover a technique that automatically disrupts our writing, pushing us into exciting new territory.

    The Exercise:

    1. Grab a favourite book from your childhood
    2. Take the each word of the text, look each up in a dictionary or on dictionary.com
    3. Count seven words down in the dictionary
    4. Make a note of your new word and replace the original from the childhood book
    5. Don’t be afraid to break the rules - if the word seven words down doesn’t feel like a good fit, then scan the dictionary page for a more suitable word
    6. Doing this you’ll quickly end up with an all new, highly surreal story that contains echoes of the original
    7. The surreal sentences you’ll be left with are the perfect source material to spark fresh ideas
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    32 mins
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All stars
Most relevant  
For the start of the writing exercise overview- begin at the 15 min mark
For the start of the actual writing exercise - begin at the 19 min mark.

If you like to listen to him talk about lots of random things early on.....the first 15 minutes are very much that.

I don't want to take away from this author and artist cuz obviously he's super passionate about creative writing and i'm loving his creative ideas. My only advice would be for him to sort of "dial it in" a bit; to bring focus to his idea, 'cuz it seems these episodes are fairly long (~35min) for a basically, simple exercise. (we're all perpetual critics, aren't we though? ;)

Ep 1 It took WAY too long to get to the exercise

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Thought this would be a good listen but the music is distracting and not easy to follow the exercises - or were they exercises? I couldn't figure it out. He has a wonderful accent. Wish this podcast would have worked for me. .....but how to unfollow????

How do you Unfollow??

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The music and sounds are weird. The first episode I was okay with, but the second episode all just became too much. All the extra noise and music is distracting. This would be good if they were less crazy with all the sound effects.

It was Interesting

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I'm interested in this topic and would like to listen to it, but the sound is so obnoxious! Some places music/sound effects are just districting, sometimes it is too loud to clearly hear the voice, and sometimes it is just completely irritating. It's like he thinks the music will make the narrative more interesting, but instead it makes it impossible for me to enjoy the narration and learn something. It's so jarring. Also his voice gets louder and quieter so it's a little hard to hear some parts. PLEASE fix the sound, I'd really like to give this product a try.

What's with this music???

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Great episodes. However, the music is distracting. Perhaps he could turn it down a bit.

Great episodes

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10 minutes of this and I can’t go on. The sound effects and weird techno music are so distracting and so much louder than they should be. If they were gone, I would give this podcast another chance.

Lose the sounds

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I really love the subject, the music on the background and the subject the writer talks about.

I’m a surrealist painter, this movement started at the same time of Dadaism started. I am so happy I got to listen about this here.

I make my paintings from the “Jeux des mots” technique. It is very similar to the cut up technique .

I do not agree with the comments left by others but everybody has different point of view.
I believe you have to connect with the narrator and the narrators story. He has something great to offer.

Peace.
Victoria S.

I absolutely love it

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Why? It's so distracting! His narration is great on its own. The sound effects detract from his lesson...

Kill the music!! Please!!

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I actually like the music and sound effects. But them I am a musician. I listened to it in background while I did my chores.
It sounded like a complete musical piece, complete with addition of voice as an instrument.

Burnt Notebook Opus 1

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I would love to learn about expressive writing, but, I have a problem when the first sentence of the book description doesn't make sense. "Inspirational hacks to transform expand your imagination and your creative writing."

Couldn't even.

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