What frustrates you in your day-to-day life? What can turn you from your easy-go-lucky, happy self into a venom-spitting viper in 3 nanoseconds or less? Is it bad drivers? When the barista screws up your coffee order? Having to spend an hour on the phone jumping through impenetrable phone-tree options to straighten out a mistake…
In the Fall, a young man’s (actually, everyone’s) fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… well… spooky stuff! Take advantage of the Halloween spirit (spirits?), channel your inner Edgar Allen Poe, stretch your creative energy in a creepy direction, and have fun crafting a scary short story or poem that sends a tingle up our spines….
If you’re a writer, you’ll hear this question a thousand times before you finally brain someone and end up in jail: “What is your story about?” At writing conferences, retreats, pitch events, backyard barbeques, Thanksgiving dinner, the airplane when the passenger next to you asks what you do, and let’s face it, from your cellmate…
I blame Julie Andrews. In The Sound of Music, she sings, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” She makes it sound so easy, doesn’t she? Turns out, good beginnings are a lot harder to write than she led me to believe. I’m never taking writing advice from a singing…
In any given situation, each individual involved in that situation will perceive the exact same things happening in different—sometimes shockingly different—ways. That’s why crime scene witness testimony is often contradictory. The same concept should be true in every scene we write in our stories. No two characters will experience the events within a scene in…