Deep Fiction: The Anchor Scenes October 12, 2013 9:30 – 4:30 p.m. Tabor Space 5441 S.E. Belmont, the Library Portland, OR The task of a novelist or memoirist is to tell a story so riveting that it will hold a reader’s attention for hundreds of pages. This requires intimate knowledge of the characters, their inner […]
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Claim Your Story Writing Conference
Claim Your Story Writing Conference Lithia Springs Resort, Ashland, Oregon October 19, 9-5 Whether you write fiction, essays, or memoir, there is an art to stringing together words to elicit an emotional response from your readers. The first annual Claim Your Story Writers Conference, October 19th at the Lithia Springs Resort in Ashland, centers around […]
Read the rest of this entry »It’s August….
And the year is spinning away. Days are growing shorter and the glittered-up glories of summer are fading. If summer has weakened your writing practice or made you foot draggy; if no splendid hopes keep you at your desk, take heart. Forget all those writerly maxims and get back at it. Here’s how: […]
Read the rest of this entry »“Start with a blank surface. It doesn’t have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but it’s true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember.” – […]
Read the rest of this entry »“There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser […]
Read the rest of this entry »Panhandling
“Along with a great deal of sensitivity, you need to develop and practice the habit of noticing: a flicker of a facial muscle that suggests anger; the tone beneath words being spoken; the movement of wind in the linden trees; the bagging at the knees of a pair of pants; what your grandmother’s apron smelled […]
Read the rest of this entry »Write like it matters
Read the rest of this entry »Brutal Truth: The so-what factor matters. A lot.
Recently I got into a kerfuffle with a writer about an essay she’d written. It was a heartfelt chronology about a loss that was mostly a step-by-step medical report. Before I go further, you need to know that this person is lovely, intelligent, and tender. But she forgot about the so-what factor […]
Read the rest of this entry »Bitter truth: Being a late bloomer means you’re in a fight against time.
Last month I met with a writer who is about my age. We were chatting about a novel she was working on and the conversation turned to aging. We fall into the over fifty category much as this shocks me to write. She is working on a novel and is involved in a critique […]
Read the rest of this entry »Bitter Truth: Everyone has an Off Day
“Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the […]
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