is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Fastball! for February 2010

Monday
Feb 22, 2010

The Lester Dent Pulp Master Fiction Plot — Martin Ball

In the aforementioned Guardian article, Michael Moorcock says:

For a good melodrama study the famous “Lester Dent master plot formula” which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.

I’d never heard of the Lester Dent master plot formula, so followed Mr. Moorcock’s advice and looked it up. What a gem!

The steps are all there, although this guide isn’t a how-to on writing stories so much as guidelines for writing a 6000 word pulp story. The #1 piece of advice is worth repeating, since he does it a few times:

Shovel more grief onto the hero.

Monday
Feb 22, 2010

Ten rules for writing fiction — Martin Ball

Printed in the Guardian, advice from Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, PD James, Michael Moorcock and others.

Too much advice to quote here, but much of it is very practical.

Make sure to click through and read part two as well.

Monday
Feb 08, 2010

DeLillo's Man In The Desert, Up Against The Wall — Martin Ball
Great interview with Don DeLillo on Morning Edition today.

Fastball! Archives

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What is Spitball!?

Spitball! is two guys collaborating to write about writing and collaboration. We're writing partners who have worked together since 2000, and placed in the top 100 in the last Project Greenlight for our script YELLOW.

Currently, we are both working on multiple screenplay, short story, and novel ideas independently and together, and collaborate on this blog.

What Spitball! used to be

Spitball! started as an attempt to collaborate on a screenplay online in real time. From January 2006 to July 2007 we worked on an interactive process to decide the story we were going to make. A full postmortem is coming, but you can find the find all the posts by looking in the category Original Version.

During this period, we affected the personalities of two of the most famous spitball pitchers from the early 20th Century. Look at our brief bios for more info about this, and so as not to be confused as to who is talking when.

We rebooted the franchise in early 2009 in its current form.


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Our Twitter account, where we note when longer articles are posted. While we're at it, here's Kent and Martin's Twitter accounts.

Kent M. Beeson

Urban Shockah pic

Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) is a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home writer, living in Seattle, WA with his wife, 2 year old daughter and an insane cat. In 2007, he was a contributor to the film blog ScreenGrab, where he presciently suggested Jackie Earle Haley to play Rorschach in the Watchmen movie, and in 2008, he wrote a film column for the comic-book site ComiXology called The Watchman. (He's a big fan of the book, if you couldn't tell.) In 2009, he gave up the thrill of freelance writing to focus on screenplays and novels, although he sometimes posts to his blog This Can't End Well, which a continuation of his first blog, he loved him some movies. He's a Pisces, and his favorite movie of all time is Jaws. Coincidence? I think not.

Martin McClellan

Burleigh Grimes pic

Martin (aka Burley Grymz) is a designer and writer. He occasionally blogs at his beloved Hellbox, and keeps a longer ostensibly more interesting bio over here at his eponymous website. You can also find him on Twitter.