Elizabeth

These are all my notes, typed into the chat, during our hour-long webinar about structure last week. This is basically an overview of what Angie is going to go into in her amazing structure class. In the class there will be only 6 people and each will get individual response from Angie on every assignment. […]

This is purely metaphor. That writing is just like hang-gliding. There are particular rules for the writer/hang-glider. You have to carry your own glider up a nineteen-mile mountain. Wings must be fully extended, the ungainly apparatus strapped to your back as if you are ready to soar at any moment. A supportive friend may be

My friend, the amazingly talented and wonderful author Elizabeth Rosner, teaches writing retreats. I don’t know what else to call them. She creates a space in her beautiful home for up to 8 writers, and she gives us prompts. These are gentle. They are suggestions. Sometimes she reads us lists of verbs. This time she

A few weeks back, one of my students came to class asking for recommendations of short story collections by a single author. We all threw out favorite titles as we went around and did our goals’ check-in, and I’ve left the list in that order, which is to say somewhat random order. Please post your

This past weekend, we celebrated Passover at a kids’ Seder on Saturday and Easter at an egg-and-candy hunt on Sunday. Being an interfaith, largely secular family involves a lot of this sort of doubling up. One of the shared themes of Passover and Easter (other than the obvious fact that The Last Supper was a

One of the things I love about having a daily writing practice is the way it feels like I’m sitting down to have a little chat with myself. I look forward to it—yes, I look forward to writing, which used to be true but has not always been true. It’s challenging to sit with our

In each of my classes, we set and check in about weekly. Regular commitment to your goals, public declaration of them and frequent tracking of them all support achievement of them. This practice, though, has a few requirements: 1) Have a goal in your heart that really matters to you, that underlies these weekly goals.

Have you ever had a great idea land on you, of a sudden? Perhaps it’s the solution to some scene or story you’ve been grappling with. Perhaps it’s a new inspiration. As soon as it arrives, it seems both miraculous and obvious, and it is the second of these two, or perhaps the combination, really,

I recently delivered one of the bonuses to my BWW students: a Publishing Workshop. We discussed query letters and how some of the published students placed books and stories. Perhaps the most important thing I talked about at the Publishing Workshop was . . .drum roll . . . rejection. We keep talking about having

People ask me about point of view often, and I often try to shrug it off a bit. Points of view can wield a lot of power, whether third or first or, occasionally, second. They do different things, but I don’t always like the way those different things are labeled or discussed because I think