Archive for the 'Keys to Success' Category

8 Reader Questions–8 Parts of Speech

“The new writer found she wrote best thinking of her readers’ questions–and how!”   This sentence contains all you need to know about writing a story. You may want to commit it to memory. I recently discovered something I think may help new writers remember everything they need to write amazing stories quickly. Usually, beginning writers simply write what speaks to
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What Writers Need to Know about Talent and Self-Discipline

The most important thing you can do is a lot of work…. – Ira Glass       They need to slow down. Sitting with the other parents in the little orange plastic chairs at Charlotte’s cello lesson, I have to force myself to be quiet. The teacher is trying hard to get the other kids (the boys) to go
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Why Writing Well Is All About Intensity

“…I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a fancy way of saying I started writing.”   I taught fiction at Mt. Hermon last week. The most
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How Jesus Unblocked My Writer’s Block and Freed Me to Write–for Good

“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.” – Thomas Merton All art, writing included, is built on ideas. The size of those ideas can’t be measured,
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Why Writing Alone Is Impossible

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazzards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.  – Joyce Carol Oates We all believe this fallacy that writing is a solitary sport. Of course we write alone. At least, that’s what we tend to think. It’s not a team activity. It’s one writer, sometimes two,
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