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Aug 1

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How Stephen King and his wife created a new generation of novelists: imagination exercises

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an article by Susan Dominus about novelist Stephen King and his family. In “Stephen King’s Family Business,” I learned that two of King’s three children have gone into the “family” business of writing novels and one son is married to another novelist. Wow. Can you imagine a family of novelists?

One thing that struck me was when King explained that as he and his novelist wife, Tabitha, put their children to bed at night, they didn’t read stories to their children, instead they asked their children to tell them stories. What a great idea and what a wonderful way to encourage young people’s imaginations.

Even as an adult, I try to think of ways to stimulate my imagination such as:

* I practice oral storytelling whenever I can, paying attention to my audience to see if I’ve hooked them. Read more

Jul 31

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Write what you don’t know and what you do

You’ve heard the writing adage, “write what you know.” Writing about what you know has a benefit of giving your writing a sense of authority — the level of detail and accuracy that makes readers feel confident and immersed in the story or ideas.

But I especially like to write about what I don’t know. For one thing, I’m a learning junkie, so I get to feed my curiosity while I write. And when it comes to some forms of writing, we don’t know what we know until we engage in writing, which is an act of discovery.

Think about how you can blend what you know with what you don’t know.

Think of your experiences and knowledge as an element or starting point. A place you know well might be your setting, but everything that happens could be brand new. Use what you know, the details and images, as a way to free your imagination. Then trust your creative powers to invent something new.

Here are two advantages to embracing the unknown: You’ll widen your writing possibilities. You aren’t limiting yourself. Think of yourself as a writing explorer. You’ll bring a fresh perspective. You might see something in an original, creative way that reveals a new spin, plot twist, or original idea.

Jul 30

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Write dialogue cues like a bestselling author

At the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference this weekend, I took a series of phenomenal classes from writing teacher and psychologist Margie Lawson. I thought I was a fairly decent writer—I have a few awards to prove it—but what I learned this weekend after taking Lawson’s classes is that “I don’t know nothing yet.”

Let’s just say that by the end of the day I literally had one brain cell left.

One of my favorite classes was on dialogue cues. For the most part, I’ve already learned to keep my dialogue tags short. He said. She said. And to avoid attributions like the following:

  • “I don’t like you,” he said, disdainfully
  • “I hate you,” she said, angrily
  • “Don’t move,” he growled
  • “Get away from me,” she hissed Read more

Jul 29

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How to use a timeline to build emotion and meaning into your memoir or novel

While writing my memoir, I found that a timeline of key events in my characters’ lives helped me excavate memories and find context. I recently added another element to my timeline that has helped me advance the emotional beats of the story as I revise. And it works for fiction as well as memoir.

Because writers must go beyond the events of a story or life to include the meaning behind the memories, I realized that a key part of a timeline could include notes about the significance, emotion, and outcomes of character milestones.

As part of my timeline, I list ages and family milestones: births, deaths, major illnesses, turning points, and historical events. The new addition of emotion and meaning behind those events helped me find more opportunities to add conflict and resolution to my scenes. Read more

Jul 25

Revise your poem with this writing checklist

So many facets of writing craft go into making a poem or story flow and resonate with readers. The complexity of fitting all the pieces together into a meaningful whole is exactly what I love about the challenge of writing and revising.

I’m creating a list (a work in progress) to remind me of what I want to think about when I write and revise my poetry. Maybe these points will help you in your writing or if you’re called on to critique a friend’s poetry.

  1. Does the title help advance the poem’s story?
  2. Is the first line compelling?
  3. Does the first line reveal what I want the reader to know? Does it ground them in the meaning of the poem, hint at what’s to come? Read more

Jul 24

How a great “voice” can make an opening line

In Joe Fassler’s recent interview with Stephen King in “The Atlantic” we learn what the bestselling author thinks a first line in a novel should accomplish. Besides establishing time and space, and hooking the reader with compelling action, an opening line should, most importantly, establish voice.

We’ve heard the term “voice” before but what is it exactly? King describes it as follows:

“A novel’s voice is something like a singer’s — think of singers like Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan, who have no musical training but are instantly recognizable. When people pick up a Rolling Stones record, it’s because they want access to that distinctive quality. They know that voice, they love that voice, and something in them connects profoundly with it. Well, it’s the same way with books. Anyone who’s read a lot of John Sanford, for example, knows that wry, sarcastic amusing voice that’s his and his alone. Or Elmore Leonard — my god, his writing is like a fingerprint. You’d recognize him anywhere. An appealing voice achieves an intimate connection — a bond much stronger than the kind forged, intellectually, through crafted writing.” Read more

Jul 23

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Five tools and tactics to increase writing productivity

Everyone I know seems to suffer from lack of focus these days due to information overload, apps, and gadgets that compete for attention. That’s especially bad news for our brains and our ability to get work done, writing and otherwise.

Here are a few of my favorite tools and tactics to stay focused. If you want to amplify your productivity, consider if these would work for you.

Shut down anything that pings. Anything that interrupts is bad for productivity, so if you want to focus on a project, turn off any notification or alert functions on your phone and computer for e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook.

Close excess windows. Set times for research and times for writing that are separate from time spent on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I’m most focused on my writing when I close everything but my Word file.

Create urgency. Stay on track by using a timer. You might like the Pomodoro technique, in which you use a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute segments called “pomodori” (from the Italian word pomodoro for “tomato”), separated by short breaks. To learn more, check out the Pomodoro website and free PDF. Read more

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