Beginning fiction writers I’ll make this quick: In fiction characters do not get along most of the time. Tension comes from fractious relationships, power struggles, disagreements, love or hate or longing that cannot be expressed. Plan your stories for turbulence, not sweetness. Fiction is a world of unease. I told you I’d be quick.
Read the rest of this entry »Author Archive
Advice from the brilliant Margaret Atwood
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood.It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else. ~ Margaret Atwood […]
Read the rest of this entry »Write first drafts on paper…
nothing approaches the uncluttered nondigital quiet of a page.
Read the rest of this entry »Quick take: Skip the “took a”
Like many editors I’ve collected my own gaggle of words and phrases that I find annoying. I can become curmudgeonly if I spot certain words in a manuscript, especially when they’re abused and appear over and over. Now, I realize that taste and preference are highly subjective and chances are I might stand alone on […]
Read the rest of this entry »“As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a […]
Read the rest of this entry »Join us in Portland on February 20
For Write, Rewrite, Repeat It’s a one-day conference jammed, and I mean jammed, with insights, tactics and genius ideas you can you use to catapult your writing career into a higher gear and greater visibility. Keynote speaker is Fonda Lee. Martial artist, inventive author, whip-smart and savvy marketer. She’ll be talking about The Strategic Author. […]
Read the rest of this entry »And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can’t really share the enormity of our lives. ~Diane Ackerman
Read the rest of this entry »Thought for the day by David Bohm
“Between where you are now and where you’d like to be there’s a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it’s a good idea to imagine that you’re already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side.” ~ David Bohm
Read the rest of this entry »
