joshua chamberlain

Category: writing

  • failure’s pretty great

    Yesterday, my roommate and I had a conversation about failure. I told him a story about writing my first full-length play. When I finished it, I printed out copies and invited a group of friends to come over and read it. This night was among the top five most embarrassing…

  • my favorite coffee mug

    A few years back, some friends and I shot a web series. It was about our lives at the theater company where we worked and no, it wasn’t very good. I wrote an episode about dealing with writer’s block. The opening shot featured my desktop, including my favorite coffee mug…

  • the machinery of storytelling

    The more I write, the more I come to think of storytelling as building a machine. The basic formula for story is a character who wants something and must confront an obstacle in the pursuit of that desire. But there are other parts to the machine as well, with metaphors,…

  • the stories we tell

    I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey, which in light of recent events, feels all too apt. “A mortal folly comes over the world,” reads the epigraph from Antonin Artaud. Couldn’t have said it better myself. One passage in particular stood out, especially when read alongside James Wood’s…

  • writing and living

    While plowing back through some of the old voice memos, I found a quote from a dear friend of mine, writer and musician Michael Winn. We were talking about writing and developing characters and he explained why he’d had such trouble capturing human life on the page: “Living your life…

  • streak

    I hate blogging. I’ve never felt I was good at it. I’d writing banal things I didn’t want floating around cyberspace. I’d write a post, then wait months before returning to the website and guilting myself into writing another. I sat down a month ago and told myself I’d start…

  • sounding like yourself

    A few years back, I finished a draft of a novel. I sent it to a few of my old college professors for feedback. They were not encouraging and rightfully so. “You don’t have a voice,” was the first thing one of them said. “You sound like Jack Kerouac doing…

  • if you want to write songs, write songs

    I had an interesting conversation today. I met a woman who described herself as a songwriter. She told me she’d been in Los Angeles for five years, trying to work in the music industry. She works at a recording studio, for a producer who has worked with a bunch of…

  • kill your heroes

    Like most American men, my early twenties could easily be described as my “Kerouac Phase.” From roughly May of 2012 until sometime in the early fall of 2018, my life was a flurry of road trips, drug use, and pursuit of genuine connection with my own artistic circle, all shaped…

  • a confession and a promise

    I’m bad a blogging. Maybe you’ve noticed. This is the first post that appears on my website since I’ve redesigned and relaunched it. Every few years, I clean house and start over. I used to blog a lot. I shared things that inspired me, ideas I was thinking about, music…