Carter Wilson's Making It Up
Making It Up is an unscripted conversation series about the messy reality of being a writer.
Each episode is a deep, unplanned conversation with writers at every stage of the journey. New York Times bestselling authors. Award winners. Debut novelists just getting started. No prepared questions. No talking points. Just two people following the conversation wherever it leads.
We talk about where stories really come from. Childhood influences. Fear. Luck. Loss. Discipline. Doubt. The highs, the lows, and the long stretches in between that rarely get talked about.
At the end of every episode, we put the philosophy into practice. We choose a random sentence from a random book and use it to create an impromptu short story. No prep. No outline. Just making something out of nothing.
Because that is the job.
And that is the point.
Visit Carter at www.carterwilson.com.
Carter Wilson's Making It Up
Making It Up with Matthew Sullivan, author of Midnight in Soap Lake
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
“If you're not exploring, if you're not really kind of pushing limits, then you really have to ask yourself, well, what am I doing here? Like, this isn't accounting, you know what I mean? It's creative writing.” —Matthew Sullivan
Matthew Sullivan is the author of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, an Indie Next Pick, B&N Discover pick, a GoodReads Choice Award finalist, and winner of the Colorado Book Award. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho and has been a resident writer at Yaddo, Centrum, and the Vermont Studio Center. His short stories have been awarded the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editors' Award for Fiction. His writing has been featured in the New York Times Modern Love column and The Daily Beast, amongst others.
Among other things, Matthew and Carter discuss alcohol and writing, writing weird and unconventional novels, and how the unpredictability of success as an author makes you a better writer. At the end of their conversation, they make up a menacing story using a line from Abbott Kahler’s Where You End.