Recent Posts

For more than twenty years, StoryCenter has been helping individual storytellers tell their own personal stories. Thousands of people. They have hundreds of these stories posted on their YouTube channel, but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the thousands of stories populating their archives. I love SO MANY of the stories on their channel, but I’m only including five here. And no, it’s not a top-five list in any way. I’m sure…

Drafting Long Listening To Your Story Finding the Heart of Your Story Finding Your Story’s Beginning Finding Your Story’s Ending Editing Ruthlessly

The physical components of almost any digital story are these: narration, score, images, and movement. As you improve as a storyteller, I think it’s important to sometimes isolate one of these components and hone your skills for the sake of that particular skill. One of your most readily available media elements is the collection of photographs you already have. But no matter how extensive that collection might be, there will come a time when you…

One of my main motivations for creating Stories21 has been to create a space where an individual digital storyteller might be able to find an active community of other storytellers. Almost anyone could take the initiative and surf the web long enough to find all sort of lessons about storytelling, recommendations about photo/video hardware and editing software, and examples of other people’s digital stories. And yes, Stories21 hopes to be all of those things, too….

Stories21 hopes to serve as a resource for people who want to create digital stories. This site is meant to serve several different purposes. In its early stages, it can serve as a resource where you can find all sorts of tools useful for creating stories you need to tell. The basic idea is that Stories21 is full of information about storytelling tools and techniques. And hopefully, if there’s enough interest, the site might start…

  There’s probably a song on your phone that perfectly captures the atmosphere of your story. Maybe your story is even about a particular song that was playing on the radio the first time you kissed a boy. Or the song aunt sang at your grandfather’s funeral. Or maybe you’re writing about your father’s passion for Yankee Stadium, but you don’t have any pictures of your own that capture the grandeur of the Bronx palace….

When I was in graduate school*, I was ambitious about my career. I saw other graduate students who were working with some fantastic scholars, and I wanted to figure out how I could get in on the action. But the strategy that I latched onto was to try to become a small part of more significant scholarly endeavors. I looked for opportunities to do grunt work no one else wanted to do because it seemed…

Contents for this Page Understanding Copyright Finding Creative Commons Materials General Sources Where to Find Creative Commons Video Where to Find Creative Commons Music Where to Find Creative Commons Images Where to Find Creative Commons Sounds and Sound Effects Where to Find Creative Commons Books Citing and Documenting Creative Commons Materials Articles and News Related to Copyright, IP, and CC Materials Organizations and Resource Sets Related to Copyright, IP, and CC Materials Copyright, IP, and Creative Commons Resources For Writing Instructors Understanding…

Keeping this website going isn’t all that expensive when you think about it. But it’s not free, either. So in order to keep the lights on at Stories21, the site often includes what are called “affiliate links.” Each of these links points you a link to an item on a retailer’s site. If you end up purchasing that item from that retailer, Stories21 gets a small commission. (Very small.) But it doesn’t cost you anything…

So you want to contact me, eh? That’s fantastic. I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to: Ask me a question. Suggest a post or page you’d like to see on the site. Give me a heads-up about something that might be relevant to Stories21. Volunteer to write and contribute a post of your own. Let me know if something on the site is confusing, hard to find, or just plain incorrect.