Happy Friday the 13th! ‘Tis the season for spooks, frights, haunts, and treats. ‘Tis also a particularly fun season for crafting Halloween-worthy stories, poems, or creative nonfiction. Here are 10 writing prompts to get your spine-chilling creative juices sparking (a la Dr. Frankenstein’s lightning bolts). Enjoy! [Photo by Marko Blažević on Unsplash]
We often fall into ruts. We drive the same route to work. We go to the same restaurants when we can’t face another night of our own cooking. We return to the same stores. We even vacation in the same locales year after year. There’s nothing wrong with a good rut or two. After all,…
In a recent workshop, I was asked to explain the difference between passive and active voice. Think of active voice as being more direct, with a noun (the subject of the sentence) doing a verb (the action of the sentence): “Daryl caught the ball” (noun=Daryl, verb=caught) or “The script revealed the killer on the first…
A friend recently confessed that she was bored by a book she had read for a book club. Having just slogged through the same book myself, I agreed completely. As I writer, I knew exactly why the book didn’t work for me. But the woman I was chatting with couldn’t articulate why she hated the…
April is National Poetry Month, so in honor of that, I’m going to share one way that dabbling in poetry can help your fiction. Specifically, have you ever considered using poetry as a way to find distinct voices for your characters? Years ago, I attended a short workshop by Lance Larsen, poet laureate for Utah…