Matthew Arnold Stern

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Archive for category Creative Writing

Where I lost Kings

Apr 5

Posted by Matthew Arnold Stern in Creative Writing, Insights | No Comments

From the NBC series Kings

A brooding Silas Benjamin (Ian McShane) ponders the fate of his kingdom in the
NBC series Kings. (Photo courtesy NBC)

I really wanted to like the new NBC series Kings. I’ve always enjoyed alternate history stories and putting modern twists on classic tales. Furthermore, there has been little that is creative and innovative on broadcast TV lately, even before the current economic crunch. For the first hour of the Kings pilot, I enjoyed the show. But one scene completely threw off my interest. Read the rest of this entry »

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Paint it Orange: A Literary Orange Review

Apr 8

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I had the great fortune of attending Literary Orange on Saturday in Garden Grove. As a writer, it was a wonderful opportunity to be inspired and to learn from others. I also had the opportunity to meet published writers and became interested in genres I hadn’t considered before. Read the rest of this entry »

Script Frenzy Week 3: Script Frenzy, We have a problem

Jun 18

Posted by Matthew Arnold Stern in Creative Writing, Script Frenzy 2007 | No Comments

For me, Script Frenzy really has been a frenzy. I’ve spent almost every free moment on my script. And three weeks in, I now have a completed draft. I spent 20 days creating a script for a musical that has been germinating within me for the past 21 years.

The problem is that after I’ve said everything I wanted to say, the script is only 17,699 words long – short of the 20,000-word goal. Read the rest of this entry »

Opening night jitters

May 7

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Nervous? Of course! And I won’t even be on stage. Tuesday is opening night for the play I wrote for my daughter’s middle school. Read the rest of this entry »

“And so it goes”

Apr 13

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Kurt Vonnegut was the novelist who got me excited about being a writer. Until I read Vonnegut, all of literature I studied in school were from classical writers who were long since dead: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, and Hemingway. Then, in my AP English class in high school, we read Slaughterhouse-Five. The book astounded me. Here was serious fiction written in a contemporary genre (science fiction) with contemporary language (including a now overused word that starts with “f”) by an author who was still alive!

I became a huge Vonnegut fan. The first hardcover novel I ever bought for myself was his 1979 novel Jailbird. I would make frequent visits to my college bookstore to build my Vonnegut library: Mother Night, The Sirens of Titan, Welcome to the Monkey House, Breakfast of Champions, and Wampeters, Foma, and Grandfallons.

It wasn’t only Vonnegut’s writing that appealed to me. Vonnegut was an author I could relate to. He seemed like a typical middle-class person like I am, with a family and a job. He wrote about issues I cared about. Since he was a contemporary writer, I could always look forward to him writing something new and addressing what was happening in the world at the time. Other literary greats seemed like musty statues in a marble tiled hall, but Vonnegut brought writing to life. He made a literary career something achievable and worthwhile to me. If Kurt Vonnegut could become a great writer, there was hope for people like me.

Now, Kurt Vonnegut is a part of history, just as Chaucer and Melville. Unfortunately, some of his writing seems to have faded into history too. The horrors of Dresden that he depicted in Slaughterhouse-Five seem as ancient to my children as Chaucer’s pilgrimage to Canterbury. I hope that some other contemporary author could make writing as alive to my children as Kurt Vonnegut did for me, but a great author like him can never be replaced.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut. Auf weidersehen?