Photography & Alice

Santanu Majumder: Devghali Beach, India Jagadishwar / Alice Coltrane / Translinear Light Album (2004) The above photo mixed with the above music. From the award-winning photographer: “The Devghali Beach in Maharashtra, India, is a secluded beach, not visited by too many tourists and definitely not at night. I spent a whole night waiting for the […]

The Shrinking Power of Modern Stories

River Man _____________________ John Fraim I’m from LA and don’t know if I hold the record for the number of screenwriting books I’ve read and categorized but I have yet to find anything like what I’ve created in my manuscript Hollywood Safari: A Dangerous Trip Through Screenplay Theories. This is why I created it. The project […]

Twist In My Sobriety

“The song is really about not understanding – when you’re 18, you’ve got a very particular emotional relationship with the world, you feel very isolated, and everybody else is so distant and cold. And I think I was singing about not feeling anything or not being moved by things around.” Tanita Tikaram “Twist in My Sobriety” is […]

Sullivan Fortner

SOUTHERN NIGHTS “Southern Nights” from the Southern Lights Album / Sullivan Fortner (2024) Sullivan Fortner Southern Nights (Artwork Records) By Frank Alkyer | Published January 2025 There’s a smile to the music Sullivan Fortner makes. It can be über serious, but inside, it smiles because that’s Sullivan Fortner — a pianist of unabashed charm and […]

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of Speech / Musk in a Famous Rockwell Painting In A Silent Way / Miles Davis ____________________________________ Yeah, I thought it looked like a Norman Rockwell painting when I first saw it on the Internet. Not sure who sent it. Elon Musk is inserted where the original figure in Rockwell’s painting Freedom of Speech […]

The New Paradigm of Story Grid?

A Talent Agency in LA Will A New Story Paradigm Soon Rule A New Hollywood? Aztec Sun God / Horace Silver ______________________________________ John Fraim Perhaps the main area of Story Grid that is different from most writing advice books today is that it is not written by some screenwriting guru or “how to” book author […]

Story Genres

_____________________ John Fraim Genre: Category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. Of all the aspects of storytelling, the one I’m most interested in is story genres. Or, story types united by the symbols of form, style and subject matter. In effect, congregations of symbols pulled […]

Genres

“Like the ever-spliting branches of a huge tree.” “Lullabye For Kara” / Sanctuary at 3:00 am / Rick Sowash ____________________________ Genre: Category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. In so many ways, storytelling today is wrapped more and more around genres as the viewing audience […]

The Story Grid

The Bitter Withy _________________________ John Fraim Again, thanks Heather for introducing me to this book. Screenwriters who come to this book might find it un-familiar based on all the various structure steps proposed. But the difference here is the creator of this system is not a screenwriter but rather a respected book editor.  If I […]