So, I had plans to write another post on redemptive character arcs tonight. I planned to write about Jenna Bush, who has a new book out about a young woman with AIDS. It seemed to me that Jenna’s story told a classic redemptive tale. It is always instructive for writers to study stories like this, […]
Well, unless you live in a cave, you know by now that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize today. I’m thrilled. But what I’ve been thinking about all day, me being the writer that I am, is Al’s character arc. It pretty neatly follows the path of the hero’s journey, made popular by Joseph […]
This is a good week for us literary freaks, what with Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize for Literature today, which you can read about in my previous post here, and the National Book Award Nominations being announced yesterday. So, let’s just cut straight to the chase here–Denis Johnson was nominated for Tree of Smoke. […]
Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature today. You can read the Reuters story about it here and the New York Times piece here. The Times piece has a great photo of her sitting on her front steps in London, surrounded by reporters. She was apparently out shopping when it was announced, and learned […]
My buddy Roy Burkhead, who lives in Mt. Juliet, outside of Nashville, sent me an email today and asked me about the difference between backstory and flashback. He’d read my post from yesterday and was pondering this deep issue. I so approve of people pondering deep issues like this pertaining to writing. Civilians think we […]
And in truth, backstory dumps do the exact opposite of keeping the reader hanging (as in, hanging on every word). Instead they keep the reader closing the book or throwing it across the room. But, I am getting ahead of myself. On Sunday I posted about how I was planning to write about backstory dumps […]
At least it is cloudy where I am, but y’all probably live in warmer and sunnier climes than us poor, pale, Northwesterners. At any rate, I am about to rearrange my office. I dragged a very old table out of the basement of my 90-year-old mother’s house and it is going to be a table […]
Over at BlogCatalog, my favorite place to hang out with other bloggers,they’ve started a new feature where you can create groups and then those groups discuss things. God, isn’t the internet great for figuring out yet more ways to waste time? At any rate, one of my favorite bloggers, Vienne of Eavesdropwriter, started a group […]
When I was on the plane to Nashville a couple weeks ago, I started reading
One of my blog buddies, Renny, suggested I answer this question for a post: How do you find your personal style as a writer? It has taken me awhile to get to it because it is a tough question to answer. Personal writing style can also be called voice and the truth is, writers who […]
