Creative Writing
Learn how to organize, plan and create your most engaging and compelling life story with the creative writing skills of bestselling fiction authors.
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Creative Writing, Productivity, Structure and Plotting, Theme, Purpose and Outcome, Training, Lessons
How to Focus your Blog Post
Start with the End in Mind Recently, a reader asked me, “How do you write a story with the end in mind? How do you know what the end is before it’s written?” He was responding to a blog post in which I wrote about using constraints to spark creativity. One of the points I made was: “Writing with the end in mind applies especially to writing memoirs. When you first apply a life lesson, a theme, a psychological or theoretical point to the memoir as its raison d’être, you don’t need to think about everything that doesn’t fit the point. “But if you don’t…
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Creative Writing, Organization and Research, Productivity, Prompts, Structure and Plotting, Theme, Purpose and Outcome
Less Is More
This morning, I went into my writing group completely unprepared to write. I had to show up at 11:00 a.m. and I’d been doing something else when the timer startled me with its petulant beeping, reminding me to get online immediately, if not sooner! Now, most times, when I go into the group, I know what I’m going to write — at least I have some idea or framework for the words I’ll be putting down — but for some reason, this morning I had completely forgotten that I had to write this blog post, so when one of my writer friends asked me what I’d be working…
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Ground your Reader with Sensory Description
We all know that it’s important to immerse our readers in our story in order that they experience it fully, but how do we do that? “Show, Don’t Tell” is a truism that writers cannot avoid. We hear it everywhere, but what does it mean; how does it work? Engage your reader, say all the great writers; readers must lose themselves in the story. But how can we do this as writers ourselves when we don’t know how our favourite authors have done it for us as readers? One way, (though not the only way) is through clear sensory description. If we remember that a story should always…
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The Evils of Comparison
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ― Oscar Wilde The saints are the sinners who keep on trying. — Robert Louis Stevenson Do you think you’re a crappy writer? Why do you think that? Did someone tell you that your writing sucks? Where did this belief originate? Whose voice do you hear in your head? Was it a teacher in the third grade or the fifth or the tenth, telling you that you’re not good enough to be a writer? I call bullshit! You’re not being fair to yourself — You’d never ask a child to paint like Rembrandt, dance like Nureyev, or sing like Pavarotti,…
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Creative Writing, Organization and Research, Point of View and Character Development, Productivity, Prompts, Theme, Purpose and Outcome, Thoughts, Opinions and Philosophical Discussions, Training, Lessons
Questions and Answers
How NOT To Write Your Memoir Most people, when they start to write their memoirs, think they have to stick strictly to the facts, that their story has to be a list of the things they did, in the order that they did them. This simply isn’t true. It leads to the belief that they have to write their entire history — an autobiography, which, for most people is messy, disconnected and hard to follow. This means that they end up with a list of dry, dull facts, like some kind of desiccated checklist that may reflect the events of their lives, but doesn’t say much about…
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Memoirs, Organization and Research, Point of View and Character Development, Prompts, Theme, Purpose and Outcome
The Significance of Memories
Every life has common themes that repeat themselves over and over. One of my own most common themes is a love of animals, so when my writers’ group chose Favourite Toys as their prompt this week, it got me thinking… What was my favourite toy as a child? Of course, there were many…the roller skates that repeatedly steered me towards every crack in the sidewalk, leading to skinned knees and copious tears; the pogo stick that bounced me straight into a pile of fresh dog poop; and the bicycle my parents bought for me — an unexpected gift and a total, wonderful surprise. But the…
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Snippets
I’m sitting in my recliner, teaching a creative writing class on Zoom, tea cooling beside me, about to show the class how to use short stories in autobiographies. I’m using the “Homework for Life” exercise from Matt Dicks’ book, “Storyworthy”. This is an exercise I’ve adapted to fit my short story workshop series and it works like a kind of free-writing or stream-of-consciousness process similar to Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. I’ve called this exercise “Snippets” and it’s a ten- or fifteen-minute activity in which students go back over their day and try to find a moment or incident that for some reason sticks out for them. It also works…
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Creative Writing, Point of View and Character Development, Structure and Plotting, Training, Lessons
It’s All About The Why’s
Often, an issue that confounds writers is finding they’ve written themselves into a corner or dead end. They wind up stuck, not knowing what happens next or how to resolve the problem. Invariably, this comes from not paying attention to the Why’s. Why would the character do something like that? Why can’t he just…whatever? Where does he go from here? This indecision is usually based on a lack of understanding of the character’s psychology — his motivations, which are based on his flaws and emotional wounds, his deepest fears and his goals, his secret desires and his limiting beliefs. Every action the character takes has a motive, and it can’t be just that the…
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Writing as Art
The following is a comment I posted in reply to a blog post from K.M. Weiland, one of the finest writers I’ve never met, but whom I follow regularly. Literature as Art In her article, Helping Authors Become Artists, she pinpoints what defines an author who has become an artist at the craft and discusses the necessity for learning the skills of writing, in order that the work cross the border from average to exceptional — the difference between talented amateur and master artist. This is a particular peeve of my own, as I believe it’s essential to learn the disciplines of any art (or science or trade) in order…
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Letters
Gotta love letters — A. B. C.’s. Without ‘em, our civilization wouldn’t exist. Other languages – other letters: Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Chinese pictographs, Druidic runes, Egyptian hieroglyphs. Throughout history, in all cultures, somehow, someone has figured out a way to record our activities in a more permanent way than fickle memory allows. The alphabet used in many modern language groups is made up of 26 letters and has the most versatility, as it doesn’t rely on the principle of one symbol, one concept. Our alphabet, our letters, derive from Latin. The modern English alphabet consists of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. The alphabet’s current form originated in about the 7th…