Posts Tagged ‘writing tips’
Building Worlds: Topics a Writer Needs to Consider
This post was inspired by Ellen Brock’s “How to Write a Believable World” YouTube video. I have always been interested in world-building. No matter whether I write poems, stories, novels or memoir, I want a stage set for readers to see and enter. Perhaps this idea came from my elementary school where we put on…
Read MoreLife in Other Worlds
“My first attempt at novel writing began in a ridiculous way…” On December 20, I wrote a blog post for the San Diego Book Review, entitled “Life in Other Worlds.” Check out the excerpt below and let me know what you think! A fiction writer joins the world they create. Occasionally a friend has suggested…
Read MoreNames: Clues to Character
Names are important. In my novel, Shelter of Leaves, names carry meaning. The first paragraph below is an excerpt from the deleted prologue. Beside her swimming pool, Elaine closed her eyes against the sun. She imagined a drifting boat flanked by trees; crimson, marigold and burnt sienna leaves spun to the ground. Brilliant leaves signaled…
Read MoreWriting Trauma
Flannery O’Connor in Mystery and Manners said: “The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene.” A symptom list of PTSD will give a reader…
Read MoreSurvival: Dreams
Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize winning essayist, in answer to a question from the audience about what is needed to become a writer, gave an answer, obvious, yet profound. It surprised me. She replied that the writer has to do more than live out in the world. In a firm voice she declared, “Our minds…
Read MoreIntentional Orphans
Writers often create from childhood experience. Deep, vivid memories, often recalled again and again as we age. They serve as an underlay and comparison to our current lives. My first post called “An Orphan Story” is a first grade memory. In third grade our teacher read the class The Boxcar Children and the fictional world…
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