Archive for the 'The craft' 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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Hold That Ideal Loosely

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.” – Ira Glass What makes it so difficult to know what we’ve said is knowing so well what we meant to say. Missing the mark. It’s a definition of sin. There’s a lot of talk these days about the “gifts of imperfection” and embracing
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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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