15 June 2015

Day 15: Words and Pictures

Welcome to Non-Fiction week!

For the next seven days we’re going to be talking everything non-fic, including podcasts, journalism, memoirs and freelancing.

So, what is Nonfiction? It is not just the history books and biographies at your local library. Non-fiction is real: it is the personal, the facts, the narrative of real world voices and stories. It is an incredibly broad genre of writing, which can be very freeing. It is writing what you know, about yourself and others, and challenging yourself to learn even more. Best of all, it’s not solely confined to the written word, and can be expressed across many creative mediums.

Today we’re talking about illustrated story-telling. How can you turn your short stories into comics? How can you turn comics into short stories? How can we use illustration to tell our stories? Find out tonight in Words and Pictures with Paul Dalla Rosa, Katie Parrish and Chris Gooch.

In the meantime, we have some recommended reading for you. Check out At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story, produced by Sam Wallman, Nick Olle, Sam Bugney, Pat Grant and Pat Armstrong for The Daily Mail. Once you’ve finished, read Pat Grant’s article over on The Walkley Foundation’s blog and get your brain ticking on what stories you have to tell that would work well illustrated.

In lighter reading, check out these interviews with Sana Amanat, Editor at Marvel and Alison Beschedel, creator of The Beschdel Test to more comics inspiration.

Betanarratives takes alternative story-telling to a new level. Betanarratives is a website of digital storytelling, interested in “new ways of telling old stories.” Their website incorporates moving image, sound, words and colour to create deeply immersive story-telling experiences. Betanarratives is the brainchild of Jessica Yu, Express Media’s 2014 winner of the Young Writers’ Innovation Prize. They run story-telling workshops with Signal Arts Studio that you can get involved in now.

Voiceworks are always on the look out for designers and illustrators to contribute to their next issue. Find out more about how to submit to Voiceworks here. You can check the resources list on our website for places open for non-fiction and visual submissions:

Finally, can you tell us a story in 140 characters or less? Write or draw your story and share it with us on twitter using #NYWM15