My mini-play/story, “In Which Eve Names Everything Else,” recently won 2nd place in the 2013 Mormon Lit Blitz contest. (If you’re interested, you can also read the discussion of my play.) The stories that I write are often inspired by a strange combination of things that I’ve been interacting with. Sometimes I have no idea […]
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 […]