story | story
Mar.03.2012
image via blogs.psychcentral.com
When we decide to write a poem, a short story, a piece of creative nonfiction, or a novel, what are we doing? I mean, what urge are we following? What role are we assuming in society?
Sure, writing can be an ego trip. It can be a living,...
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Feb.28.2012
I've recently had advice from an agent (who didn't sign me) concerning one of my novel manuscripts, and my pal Lyn is deep into negotiations with her agent over her novel's structure.
image via altongansky.typepad.com
What seems clear from both conversations is that agents are, for...
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Feb.17.2012
It really began with "The Swing." I heard it, I read it, I memorized it, I wrote it, and then I wrote my own poem. I was in love. Truely infatuated with words. Ripple, why that rhymes with pimple-and I was off writing a poem about pimples on that boy's face. Before...
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Feb.09.2012
We talk occasionally about the unity of story, how it's supposed to hang together and keep us interested. But my writing pal, Lyn, brought me a tough question recently: How do characterizations fit into that unity of story?
At first thought - they don't. Characters are discrete, individualistic,...
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Feb.09.2012
Action is what happens. Plot is why it happens. Story is why it matters.
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Feb.08.2012
Before I began writing full time, I was a production potter. I strove to create beautiful work that was also functional. For me, beauty and function have never been separate ideals. A pitcher that is easy to lift and pours a smooth stream of liquid without dripping is beautiful for how it...
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Jan.23.2012
Sometime last April, months before Velva Jean Learns to Fly was published, I received an email from a woman named Linda Newby, a travel agent in Anaheim, California, telling me how much she loved the book. Through a good friend with ties to Penguin, Linda had come across an advanced reading copy...
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Jan.17.2012
By my normal patterns, I would be writing from Ohio right now, but all patterns have been broken. I am writing instead from Eldoret, a city of 200,000 in western Kenya. When my friends heard that I was planning a trip to Africa, the words "safari" and "lions" were a part of the conversation. The...
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Dec.23.2011
An agent recently told me during a face-to-face, and concerning a manuscript of mine he was looking at, "You're telling too much at the beginning. It's an information dump. Spread out the back ground stuff, maybe over something like the first fifty pages."
You always give the agent the benefit of...
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Dec.11.2011
This one I wrote a while ago, and it was snaffled up at the time in several different versions by various eccleisiastical markets who loved the Christmas angle and just wen crazy with it. It was perhaps not themost widely distributed short story I ever wrote, but it was certainly amongst the most...
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