A few weeks ago, I had the equivalent of a writer’s meltdown until I made two conclusions, one of which involved meeting a certain person by the name Lise Weil. (You can read about it here). After talking to her and learning about the writing retreat that she runs a few times a year, I decided…
Category: on prose writing
Six Rules of Grammar Fiction Writers Can Challenge
By Tamsin de la Harpe 1. Sentence Fragments. Look, fiction writers use sentence fragments. Most of you should know this by now, because you read books and if they’re halfway decent books you’ll see sentence fragments. Like this. Assuming, however, that your high school English teacher broke this habit out of you, along with the…
Old Photographs and Memoir
By Lee Martin of http://leemartinauthor.com I remember on New Year’s Eve, when I was a boy, my father’s side of the family would gather for a supper of oyster soup and games of cards—usually either Pitch or Rook. This was in a day when we didn’t have cell phones that took pictures, when we didn’t…
Organizing the Memoir
By Lee Martin of http://leemartinauthor.com Were you feeling a little disorganized around the holidays? Imagine the way writers of memoirs must feel when faced with the task of giving shape and structure to the experiences that they’re trying to render on the page. I’ve had a request to talk about such things, so here goes. When writing…
Lessons of an Independent Author: The Power of Publicity
{Originally published at lisaakramer.com} I won’t deny it. I had this fantasy that I would wake up sometime during the month of December to discover that I had become an overnight best-selling author sensation. Of course that is pure fantasy in a world where hundreds of thousands of new books are published daily; the chances…
Focusing Your Flash Fiction
By T.K. Young of http://www.flashfictionblog.com Flash fiction is all about brevity. So if you want to write good flash fiction, focus is the critical skill for getting your message across in a format that forces you to use as few words as possible. But there are three big pitfalls that can lead to unfocused writing: Lack…
Stuck? Try Writing Poetry
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any new writing. There is a reason for that: busy, busy, busy relaunching my first book under my own name, busy revising the sequel so it might be ready in the new year, and well, Life keeps happening. And another thing: being in this writing group of mine has really…
Novel Writing: Enrichment of Real Research
By Mark Fine of http://finewrites.blogspot.com/p/main-page.html In writing and researching my historical novel The Zebra Affaire, I had the privilege of viewing many wild creatures in their natural habitats. Being in the bush, tracking game (with camera, and not firearm) is not a bookish, academic pursuit. The composite of the senses are vital to telling your story: the wretched…
Characterization and the Car Crash
By Ken Elkes of http://kenelkes.wordpress.com Some musings on writing. Let’s start with three examples: 1. I was in a road traffic accident the other day. I didn’t suffer any injuries, though my car may not be repairable. Unfortunately it was my birthday. 2. I had an interesting birthday. Got into a car crash on the motorway. Not a scratch on me…
A Few Choice Words
By David Kent of http://writerinthemountains.blogspot.com What’s the difference between ordinary writing and extraordinary literature? Word choice. That is not some editorial decree to run out and buy a new thesaurus (although if you don’t own J. I. Rodale’s Synonym Finder, you should go get it), there is a lot more to word choice than a…
Writing Your Own Writing Prompts
By Jennifer Dunn of http://coffeeandacloseddoor.blogspot.com Yesterday I wrote about why I’ve decided to make my own writing prompts, and I described how I planned to do this. You can find out all about it right here.For a few days prior to posting yesterday, I’d been trying out my method with pretty decent success, but I wasn’t…
Flash Fiction: As Old as Aesop's Fables
by Leanne Radojkovich of http://www.leanneradojkovich.com Very short stories are as old as Aesop’s fables. Jorge Luis Borges, Kate Chopin and Anton Chekov (who said “I can speak briefly on long subjects”) have embraced the form. Ernest Hemingway has 18 very short stories in his book In Our Time which might today be called flash, as might Franz Kafka’s Parables and…