NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month: a frenzy of writing with the goal of producing a 50,000-word novel in the thirty days of November. NaNo is a fantastic opportunity to push yourself as a writer. It’s all about quantity of words, not quality. It’s vomit writing, spilling your guts, taking an idea and running…
Category: General Interest
Over the Hills and Far Away
A report from South Dakota: Cool Writers, A Controversy and a Rock Star Deadwood, South Dakota is 385 miles north of Denver. You shoot straight through Cheyenne, parallel the eastern border of Wyoming and watch trains tugging their long snakes of coal. The road climbs east through the Black Hills. In late September, gold aspen…
Getting faster all the time… Not!
I’ve been writing fiction for almost 25 years. You would think in all that time it would get easier and the writing would go faster. But this is how it really is: I begin my book. Three lines in, I start to agonize. Am I starting in the right place? Is this a dramatic enough…
KEEP IT TO YOURSELF, SOMETIMES
I remember one of my first writers conferences. I pitched a project to one of the visiting agents or editors, and I remember being so thrilled when he asked to see the first three chapters. Later, one of the more seasoned conference attendees asked me how my pitch went and in my excitement I told…
Is It Enough To Simply Tell An Entertaining Story? … by Glenn Rogers, Ph.D.
Is it enough for a writer to simply tell a good story? No. In the process of telling an entertaining story, a good writer, even if only implicitly, deals with important ethical, social, relational, or personal concerns. A good writer helps readers think about important things while they are being entertained. There is a long…