Friday I hit the wall. As is my usual wont, I woke early (6ish), grabbed my coffee, and went to work on my writing. Lately I've been thinking deep thoughts about my novel rewrite and writing them down, which leads to more deep thoughts and more writing. I'm writing about characters, trying to get to […]
Please welcome my good friend Linda Busby Parker to Wordstrumpet today. I'll let Linda tell you the story of our friendship, but I want to urge you to go visit her blog, because she is starting a book club on May 1st, and let me just tell you, nobody deconstructs a novel the way Linda […]
It's Friday again! This is going to be a brief post, because I am in Nashville. However, I couldn't leave you to your weekend without another installment of festive Fridays, now, could I? In case you have forgotten, we're designing a crazy dance party for either you or your characters. You can read the original […]
So here it is, Friday again. Since I often have a busy day on Friday, and sometimes don't have a lot of time for a blog post, last week I asked for ideas about a short, useful feature to begin on Fridays. I got lots of great suggestions, because, well, I have the best readers […]
Yesterday I wrote a blog post called Have a Place to Go in Your Writing. It was about how important it is to know where you are going when you begin a writing session. You can go back and read it here, but you don't really have to in order to understand this post. This […]
When writing, it is important to have a place to go. For instance, Ernest Hemingway always ended a writing session in the middle of a sentence, thus insuring that he had a place to go when he started the next day. I've relearned this lesson over and over again in my own work. If I […]
When something isn't working, there's a reason. I know. Duh. But how many times have you sat at your computer, beating your head against your desk, trying to make something work that isn't working? Trying to force a character to do something she doesn't want to do, or writing a scene in a location that […]
"Make work" is my all-purpose notation to myself that I use for both notes and on manuscripts. It is shorthand for "Make it work," and a very handy two words. If I'm writing notes, and they are a bit sketchy, I add, "make work," because I know in my brain what I mean, I just […]
First there was the story I read online about how the Northwest, including Portland, could expect a major earthquake of the sort that just decimated Chile sometime in the next 50 years. I hate earthquakes. I expect the earth beneath my feet to stay steady, thank you very much. Then I watched a little bit […]
Years ago, in a critique group I was a part of, we used to talk about Burning Questions. It began when I was working on a novel and got stuck halfway through. I didn't know where I was going and couldn't see my way to the end, so I sat down and wrote a series […]
