I just read an incredible article in the NY Times about a female director, Sonia Nassery Cole, and her battle to make "The Black Tulip," an Afghani film critical of the Taliban, which she filmed on location in Kabul in 2009. As the article states, it is extremely rare for a film to be shot on location in Afghanistan, and it is unbelievable to me what she and her crew endured to get this movie made-- including death threats, bomb blasts, and having her lead actress' feet cut off by militants a few weeks before production.
And yet, to me the most powerful part of the story is the fact that this woman, an Afghan expatriate, refused to allow violence to derail her from the story she needed to tell. Come danger and even death, she knew she had a story and she knew it had to be told.
That's powerful. That's what it means to be a storyteller.
Sometimes I think there are two different kinds of writers in the world. There are the writers that love the craft and are always searching for their next story through which to share their voice. And then there are writers who burn with a story they need to tell, and they develop their writing for the purpose of sharing that specific story.
I would definitely consider myself in the first camp. I love to write, but good stories are hard to come by. And I envy those in the second camp, because you need to have a compelling story to keep people coming back to your work.
I need to find a compelling story.
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