Hacker Cinema
FairyTale: A True Story
1997 · Film · 99 min
Directed by Charles Sturridge
In 1917, two children take a photograph, which is soon believed by some to be the first scientific evidence of the existence of fairies. Based on the true story of the Cottingley Fairies.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Thank you, I've started reading the Jack Hart, looks great. It's about narrative non-fiction, like in journalism or history. (My favourite book genre is essays - mostly non-narrative non-fiction.) I've loved Story for a long time, one of my favourite books. It's full of wisdom, but note that it focuses on writing, analysing and understanding movies–its full title is Story: Substance, structure, style and the principles of screenwriting.
They are both easy to train if you have trainers who are thinking about it as craft. That being said, if you are working in the technology field, you are more likely to work with individuals who actively learned engineering but passively learned writing.
Alternative example: early on in my career, I was a software developer for a PR agency and then a news organization after that. At these organizations, solid writing and editing is drilled just as much as good code review or test coverage is taught in engineering organizations. Their lunch-and-learn sessions aren't about new JavaScript frameworks; they analyze how a particular piece of text was created and find ways to improve it.
My single largest "level-up" in this domain was when I started reading more on character creation in fiction. It forced me to think about how I'm telling stories, which then meant I had to think about how I constructed paragraphs, which then... you get the idea. Some great books I read:
- Robert McKee's "Story," which analyzes how great screenwriting is constructed. You will view action movies in a totally different way after this.
- Corbett's "The Art of Character," which focuses on how characters are created
- Roman/Raphaelson's business writing book, which was recommended by PR legend David Ogilvy
- the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff manuals (https://www.jcs.mil/Library/CJCS-Manuals/). These are rigidly structured texts with strange language that forced me to consider writing for a different audience than I normally would (military officers versus tech engineers)