Can we be brutally honest? As a writer, you simply cannot be a nice person – at least not when it comes to your characters. There is no quicker way to lose reader interest than to present characters who never face failure or loss, who are never in danger, who never have to make impossible […]
So before I started teaching writing, I was a Youth librarian. And as everybody says, you can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the library out of the girl. Especially when it’s someone like me. I was always the one chasing down the kiddos as they were leaving because I’d […]
When I do my prewriting classes, I always start with a session on idea generation. Sometimes students will already have a character in mind, or a genre they want to work in, or a few plot events, but I ask them to put that aside and – as a group – work out a brand […]
Last month I talked about character self-awareness in the psychological sense. But today, I want to get into the other way this term is used when talking books: literary self-awareness, where we find fictional characters who either understand their genre, or who realize they are taking part in a story. This is also known as […]
Readers are trained to try and figure out puzzles. No matter what the genre, we give them clues in our foreshadowing, paid off in plot twists and revelations that feel surprising-yet-inevitable. As readers, we want to feel smart – like we figured out what the writer was trying to do a page or two before […]
Sitting around with a group of writing students a while back, the concept of purple prose came up. Nearly all of them knew they were supposed to avoid it, but not necessarily what it was, or where the term came from. To understand the idea, you need to think in terms of purple cloth, which […]
Just got back from ten days in California, plus a follow-up beach weekend – all (as per my hubby’s request) without my laptop. He knows me. If I’d had my computer handy, writing would have been in the back of my mind, and I’d have been up after everyone had gone to sleep trying to […]
I’ll admit it. I am a Pinterest addict, heading rapidly towards 10,000 pins. I make some sort of Pinboard for every class I teach, and every project I plan – not to mention those I’ll probably never get around to. While the most obvious thing for a writer to do with Pinterest is marketing, I […]
We went on a mini-road trip over the weekend, and that got me thinking about journeys, both real and literary. The weather the past week or so has been unseasonably warm and absolutely gorgeous. We have a brand new little car (after sharing a gas-guzzling vehicle for three years) that we were able to fill up […]
On Friday, we had a meeting with the new/returning Work Study Employees for the kids/teen camps. I asked them all to tell each other their majors. When they’d gone around the room, one of them jokingly asked, “So what’s your major.” “Life,” I said. And it’s true. I finished my last round of formal education […]
