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Category: fiction
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An important character to add for your protagonist
Ok, in my last post, I promised the next one would deal with a character you want to add in for your protagonist. There are actually TWO that I’ll talk about. Think positives and negatives. For a muscle to get stronger, it has to push against something, a heavy weight. This weight is…
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Katabasis and your narrative fiction
In Linda Lappin’s article, “Your Journey to Hell and Back,” in the September 2013 edition of The Writer, she returns to Joseph Campbell’s classic text, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, to discuss KATABASIS: According to Campbell, in myths fairy tales and fictional narratives of mythic resonance, the hero’s or heroine’s descent to the…
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Title Generator #002: More titles for your poetry and prose !
Yesterday, I mentioned a mashup method for creating unique titles. Here’s a second, and I’ll use the same book as my resource as an example (Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia). You, of course, can use any anthology that might be sitting on your bookshelf. Purely on a whim, and since…
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Title generator #001: Great titles for your poetry or prose!
One way to jolt your creativity is to come up with a list of new titles for pieces you HAVEN’T written yet. One way to do that is to make a mashup of OTHER titles. For instance, I recently bought a copy of Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia. Here’s a bit…
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Starter for you and your writing: Take it from here!
Ok, I’ve had a marvelous time in Phuket, Thailand, and soon I’ll be off to Malacca, Malaysia. In the meantime, it’s time to get back to the writing. Here’s a starter to get us going this week… First, read this beginning from “River of Toys,” by Edward Allen: I love to walk with my…
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Nonfiction openings #005: Life bites back!
First, read the following opening: KILLING MY BODY TO SAVE MY MIND, by Lauren Slater, from Elle My blood is in a blender. It’s just about the only bit of brightness in this drab office of a life insurance company that, before betting on my body, wants to sample its various fluids. First, it…
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Nonfiction beginnings #004: When reality hits hard!
First, read… THE BITCH IS BACK, by Sandra Tsing Loh, from The Atlantic During menopause, a woman can feel like the only way she can continue to exist for ten more seconds inside her crawling, burning skin is to walk screaming into the sea—grandly, epically, and terrifyingly, like a fifteen-foot-tall Greek tragic figure wearing a…
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Nonfiction beginnings #003: Sarcasm to the ultimate!
In the following passage, watch how Mark Edmundson creates a long buildup, lulls us into what we expect to hear–and then snaps us out of it in an instant! WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? by Mark Edmundson, in The Oxford American Welcome and congratulations: getting to the first day of college…
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Nonfiction openings #002: “The Good Short Life” by Dudley Clendinen
As you read the following introduction, keep in mind that it is NONFICTION: THE GOOD SHORT LIFE, by Dudley Clendinen, from The New York Times Sunday Review I have wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of handcrafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous…
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Nonfiction openings #001: “You Owe Me,” by Miah Arnold
I’ll begin this week’s look at nonfiction openings with a tear-jerker from Miah Arnold: YOU OWE ME, by Miah, Arnold, from Michigan Quarterly Review The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written or how much they…