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When you’re writing do you tell people what your working on or not? When I teach narrative writing, I often ask students to do prewriting activities that involve oral storytelling. Students tell about something that has actually happened to them. It’s helpful to do this because you can orally narrow down a topic, rehearse details, [...]
Rich Prewriting Enhances Novel I’m currently researching material for my novel. Setting. I’ve sort of settled on a setting; often for me, the setting comes first. I’m looking at sequences of events, variations on those sequences, variations in how the setting might look at different times, some of the odd-ball jobs in this setting, etc. [...]
Private v. Public Stories: When to Hold Back We’re talking about those old files, old stories, old passions that are hidden in your file drawer. Here are four manuscripts that should stay in your drawer. Your first manuscript. No, you are not allowed to air your first attempts at writing fiction to the world. No. [...]
A 5-part series. How Valuable is Your File Drawer? You are writing fiction and building a career. One of your valuable assets is your file drawer, your rejected stories. I have 2 four-drawer file cabinets full; plus, my flash includes many partial or complete manuscripts and ideas for stories that never made it to a [...]
Letting Characters Emerge Hurrah! My potential character took the bait! He is revealing himself slowly. As I was thinking of ideas for picture books, an idea came up: what if the family was structured in a distinctive way? At 2 a.m. this morning, the character woke me up and started dictating a scene about dealing [...]
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