I’ve mentioned this before: a portion of your story’s scenes need to rise, to explode, to provide surprises the reader never saw coming. In these pull-out-the-stops scenes your characters can fumble, make mistakes, stage confrontations, discover dead bodies or that their beloved is sleeping around. Feature them stooping to new lows or achieving new highs. […]
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Ted Hughes on investing heart
“That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armor, and the naked child is flung out into the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and […]
Read the rest of this entry »Ray Bradbury on feeding the muse
“It isn’t easy. Nobody has ever done it consistently. Those who try hardest, scare it off into the woods. Those who turn their backs and saunter along, whistling softly between their teeth, hear it treading quietly behind them, lured by a carefully acquired disdain. We are of course speaking of The Muse. The Feeding of […]
Read the rest of this entry »April is National Poetry Month
“…When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the […]
Read the rest of this entry »A wee bit of advice….
from Neil Gaiman “The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself . . . That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.” Keep writing, keep […]
Read the rest of this entry »Short Story Contest
The Writer short story contest kicks off soon, and we want to give you a head start. Choose one of the ocean-themed quotes below as a launching point for your 1,000-word fiction story: “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself […]
Read the rest of this entry »What’s your story?
“What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To […]
Read the rest of this entry »Apologies
My apologies for my absence from this site. I have been occupied, preoccupied with my elderly parent’s tenuous situation (they live in a remote area of northern Wisconsin) and my mother’s health. I traveled there to help with my mother’s end of life care. She died on March 7 of congestive heart failure and the […]
Read the rest of this entry »Thought for the day on diaries
“One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. […]
Read the rest of this entry »Quick take: Violence = consequences
I’ve worked on a number of manuscripts where violence happens on the page and the story just sort of moves along. Violence requires consequences–injuries, trauma, legal repercussions, banishment. It also requires enough back story to support the character committing violence. If a sweet young thing punches out an adversary, we need to believe she’s physically […]
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