Timothy Johnson

Category: What I Learned

  • What I learned From The Dog Stars

    Good boy, Jasper.

    I really like lit-to-film adaptations, so when a movie comes out that I’m interested in and it’s based on a book, I’ll usually read the book as well as see the movie. I don’t think that’s weird. What’s maybe a little weird is how I then look at them in conversation with each other as if they’re simply two cameras showing us the same story with their own perspectives and filters and, from that, how I then think we can view the different interpretations of a common story as statement pieces of their respective storytellers.

    I once built and taught a literature class around that idea and got to teach it for a couple years. It was fun. I’m a huge nerd.

    So anyway the film adaptation of The Dog Stars came out, and it so happened some friends had recommended recently I read the book because they thought it was up my alley, and boy howdy is it. It was something of a surreal experience for me reading this story about a couple of guys and a dog trying to survive after an apocalypse and seeing how thematically and emotionally similar it is to this novel I worked on for five years and nobody seems interested in publishing (#NotBitter).

    It’s a very different book, of course, but if I could have a beer or a coffee with Peter Heller (the novel’s author), I imagine we’d have some things to talk about.

    As it is, I really enjoyed The Dog Stars (both the book and film), and they taught me some things. Such as…

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  • What I Learned From Widow’s Bay, Season One

    This post is the first in a new series I’m calling “What I Learned…” For years, I’ve been wrestling with reviews, their utility, why we even write them, who actually cares? That’s why I started approaching reviews not from a place of, “is this good or bad?” but from a place of, “what does this do, and who would find value in what it does?”

    I realized what I was doing was putting a piece of storytelling under a microscope and trying to find elements of it that we could take forward with us. I was trying to figure out what I learned.

    Ah! Eureka! An approach to talking about popular storytelling that’s both useful and easily accessible!

    For writers, the utility is obvious. What can we learn about storytelling from this piece of storytelling?

    For readers, though, I think it might be interesting to see how a writer experiences a piece of popular storytelling, so I hope there’s something in it for those types, too.

    I’m starting with what I learned from Widow’s Bay, season one, and don’t worry. No spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet. These will always be spoiler free. 

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