A friend of mine was reminiscing about travel. “We didn’t travel much as a family, growing up,” he said. “We went once to California, once to Washington, once to Florida…” DUDE, I thought, you travelled a LOT. That’s three once-in-a-lifetime trips before you were an adult! I have never heard Read more…
I hear a lot about how it’s important to have an ego in writing. You have to believe you have something worth saying. You need that self-belief to battle the tide of rejection. It’s advice that always made me uncomfortable. I saw a lot of people around me with too Read more…
I’ve written before about how genre is a set of expectations. Those expectations can be set for the reader when they see the author’s name, or when they enter a certain section of the bookstore, or see the cover art. Titles, back cover copy, the first sentence – all of Read more…
Well, I did it! I wrote 50 new short story drafts in 42 days. I started strong, zipping out some flashy flash pieces, and I slogged and hit writer’s block and I did sorta take four days out to revise a novel because that’s the kind of crazy I am. Read more…
Every time I walk to Little Italy for lunch, I pass a silent act of violence. It’s a mural painted in 1996 by the CWRU Art Education department. Typical of your community project murals, it is an amalgam of images from the neighborhood, representing different businesses and organizations in the Read more…
During the write-a-thon, I found myself looking for the shapes of stories – the very vaguest, simplest structures I could find. Something to start with, like an artist starts with an outline or sketch. When you’re in a crunch to produce a complete work, it helps to have an idea Read more…
So once upon a time I thought I’d write about story shapes – the idea that stories can be thought of in these vague archetypical forms, and that will help with writing them. I jumped right in with “The Caper” and then I made this draft post titled “The Hero Read more…