Last Friday I went to a writing workshop by award winning author Susan Palwick, whose new book Mending the Moon was just released. Susan Palwick gave a workshop on point of view. We commonly think about point of view as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd–who is telling the story? A great analogy for this is camera angle, which […]
I went to a writing event last night and author Cindy R. Williams taught about Character Recipes, an approach she uses to get to know her characters. Basically, you create a recipe for your character that includes things like physical characteristics, personality traits, flaws, fears, and dreams. Instead of doing it on a character, we […]
I’ve added a new page to my site with quotes and metaphors about the writing process. Okay, there’s a fair number of similes too, but similes are a type of metaphor. The first semester I taught a college writing class, I got to the day I was supposed to teach about writing process and thought, […]
This is a metaphor that I’m borrowing from mystery writer Michael Connelly. He writes: From somewhere in my memory, either amateur hour TV or the boardwalk in Venice, I remember a sideshow act called plate spinning. The object of this entertainment endeavor is to rotate plates balanced on thin wooden dowels. The practitioner gets several […]
A lot of times, rhetoric is taught in college with the immediate purpose of helping students become better at writing college papers. But what I love about rhetoric is it’s everyday, normal uses. When we first moved into this apartment, my daughter’s door would jam, and sometimes I would have a really hard time opening […]