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Posts from the ‘Craft’ Category

May 21

How listening to poetry sparked my muse: ode to Billy Collins

Recently, while on a six-hour plane ride, I listened to former poet laureate Billy Collins’ CD “Billy Collins Live.” After the hilarious introduction by comedian and actor Bill Murray, Collins reads nearly thirty of his own poems.

As mentioned in a previous post, “Three Ways to Feed Your Muse,” I often find inspiration in other writer’s works. As I was listening to the flow of words and ideas from Mr. Collins, one particular poem nabbed me and before long I found myself writing a new poem. Read more

May 18

Perfecting your first page and other inspiring ideas

Celebrate Friday with these tidbits of writing advice.

In Revealing Character through Details, Julie Eshbaugh at Publishing Crawl explains her philosophy about expressing character details in fiction and includes several examples.

Then, head over to writer and editor Jane Friedman’s blog to read Perfecting Your First Page: Three Tasks or Exercises.

May 17

3 Comments

How to use symbols in your writing

As a poet, I collect symbols. Because poems are usually shorter than novels, we have less space to get our meanings across, and a symbol can convey a mood or theme in a few words.

In a longer work like a novel, symbols can help deepen the plot, add to characterization, and expand themes.

But what exactly is a symbol? I like this definition from http://fictionwriting.about.com:

A symbol is a person, place, or thing that comes to represent an abstract idea or concept-it is anything that stands for something beyond itself. Read more

May 14

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Writing a freelance assignment? Gather the facts

Besides being a newspaper reporter early in my career, I’ve worked in the corporate trenches writing everything from news and feature stories for customer magazines and newsletters, to sales and fundraising letters. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time as a ghostwriter.

After all these years, my work style is second nature, from how I prepare for an assignment to how I interview sources and get into the writing itself.

But I often run into people who are eager to break into copywriting or freelance writing and they want to know how to go about it, so I decided to analyze and share some of my personal best practices.

Read more

May 11

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A poem from my son in honor of Mother’s Day

 

One of the benefits of our recent remodel has been finding treasures as I put the house back together. Below is a poem I found that my son wrote when he was seven years old. He liked to create little booklets of poems and give them to me for special occasions–Mother’s Day or my birthday.

Books have been a part of my life since I was a young girl sitting on my mother’s lap, lulled by the stories she read to me. I, in turn, cherished reading books to my son when he was young. I guess you can say we have “book love” in our family. See for yourself:

Read more

May 10

A letter to writers from John Steinbeck

Does starting a story scare you? Maybe you put off putting pen to paper because of fear. John Steinbeck felt the same way.

In a letter to writers, Steinbeck wrote:

“It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.” Read more

May 9

Creating high-concept story ideas, part 2

In my last post, I described what makes a high-concept story idea: one that grabs our attention or is a twist on the usual story.

In this post, I’ll share some places to find those high-concept ideas:

1. Your local newspaper. Whenever I find an unusual article, I file it away for possible use later. Example: Years ago, I read a story in the Seattle paper about an elderly couple who’d gone on an outing to the library and then simply disappeared for three days. Both had dementia and they drove around for days, trying to find their way back home. Wow! That, in itself, is pretty unusual. I could write a poem or short story about this or base a character in a book on this story. Read more

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