To Our Hostess: If you’re still looking for topics, how about something on getting back to writing after one of those periods of stress that justifies dropping writing like a hot rock while you cope? You’ve touched on it in various posts about being stuck, but I
Read more →Deep Lurker wanted to know what my ideas look like when I come up with them, specifically whether they’re just concepts or whether they have skeletal plots attached. Unsurprisingly, the answer is “It varies.” The slightly longer answer is “It varies A LOT.” To give you a
Read more →Still with the process questions, starting with “What in the writing process TERRIFIES you (gives you bouts of anxiety)…and how do you push through it? For example, a blank page is both terrifying and exciting at the same time…” I think I spent ten minutes staring at
Read more →I suspect that I shouldn’t have been surprised when my request for blog topics netted several about my process and career, but I was. The first one I’m going to deal with was about letting projects “ferment” and its implied negative effect on productivity and the writer’s
Read more →I feel like I keep coming in fourth at the Olympics. – Tiana Smith Trying to break into publishing is a time-consuming and deeply discouraging process. It always has been. There is little that can make someone feel as unappreciated and untalented as a string of form
Read more →Thank you all for your input; I’ll try to get around to everyone’s suggestions in the relatively near future. I’m going to start with a post about getting stuck, because the first two suggestions were both aspects of that and I haven’t written about it for a
Read more →For those who don’t know, I live in Minnesota. The weather here is a perennial topic; the news reports the temperature every hour on the hour, and every fifteen minutes (it seems like) when it’s particularly unusual. People talk about the weather constantly. Yesterday, I overheard at
Read more →Listening to NPR the day after Thanksgiving, I heard a story about an archive of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s manuscripts. “They are covered with handwritten corrections!” the archivist enthused, to which the interviewer responded, “The idea that he corrected himself just blows me away.” Which response rather blew
Read more →I drove down to Chicago yesterday with my father, and I let him pick the route. Instead of taking the freeway through Wisconsin, which I have done many times and which takes about 7 hours plus meal and gas stops, we drove down the west bank of
Read more →“If you’re having trouble with your ending, look at your beginning.” – Anonymous One of the most important elements of a story is a satisfying ending, and a satisfying ending almost always involves closure. You see it in the terminology we use to talk about the structure
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