Charlotte Rains Dixon

I recently wrote about how I had been stuck at the funeral of one of my characters for months, until it finally hit me that the character had not actually died and that is why I was having such a hard time with her funeral.  Sigh.  Sometimes writing fiction is just hard.

I’ve had another similar, though not so dramatic, experience this week.

After the funeral revelation, I dithered about for a few weeks more until it finally occurred to me that I had yet another problem: the book was set in the wrong location. 

I desperately wanted it to be set in Gatlinburg, which I adore for its mix of down-home tacky, ancient nature, and lots of good old-fashioned fudge.  Alas, I was trying to make this location work, when it really didn’t at all. 

So away we have flown from Tennessee and back to the west coast.  I have an iron-clad rule that I don’t talk specifics about any work of fiction while I’m working on it, because I think that dissipates the energy of it.  Suffice it to say, however, that it is a charming location somewhere in the state of Oregon.

There’s a funny thing about me and locations–I have to fall in love with a place before I can write about it.  The good news is that it doesn’t take much for me to fall in love with a place.  The only place I can think of that I’ve visited and not fallen in love with is Boston.  Well, and Albany, New York.  Sorry to all of you who live in those cities, don’t take it personally, really.  I’m just odd when it comes to places. 

I want to take this opportunity to do a preview of coming attractions.  (what opportunity, you ask?  The fact that you are reading me!) Stayed tuned for more on goal setting, and several posts on specific ways to pull yourself out of the writing bogs. I’m also planning to talk about structure.

And while I am at I would also like to wish my Mom a happy birthday.  She is 91, and she calls the internet Ebay, as in "Oh gee, you can book a flight on Ebay?  That is just amazing," so she’s not going to be reading this post, but send her good thoughts anyway. 

The space between wanting to write and actually writing can feel like a yawning chasm, or a huge abyss. We all carry stories within us and for some it becomes an urgent need to get those stories out.  Gregg Levoy, the author of the book, Callings, told a story at a conference years ago that […]

I spent all yesterday without the internet.  This is like making Scarlett O’Hara live without Tara or my pug live without food or a gambler live without Las Vegas.  Not only that, we were without television and the land-line, too.  Now, nobody ever answers the land-line, I have a cell phone, and I rarely watch […]