Book Writing World has collected a lot of wonderful success stories this year. Celebrate with us, tell us your successes or get ready for next week’s enrollment in 2014 BWW courses that will ensure your success in the New Year! Lea: My first book, Walk With Me: A Companion and Guide for Parents, was accepted […]
BWW Success Stories 2013 Read More »
Those of you following the television musical soap opera Glee will be aware that the character Finn Hudson died mysteriously and unexpectedly—because the actor who played him, Cory Monteith, overdosed on “a lethal combination of alcohol and heroin.” This is a tragic situation, and the more so to watch because the actor who plays his
Story v. Life: What Glee and Downton Abbey Can Teach Writers Read More »
What is build? The progressive rise of stakes and action in a story. An increasing investment by the reader–and the characters. A story starts when (or just before) something happens that challenges the status quo, that throws everything off balance. And then what happens? The character attempts to address the problem, in the way that
Story Build Baseball Read More »
English was not their first language, it was clear. They stood on the sidewalk outside Davies Symphony Hall and peering at a guidebook, rotating it so that the orientation of the map matched the way they were facing. “MacAllister Street?” the man asked, and I told them they only had to walk three blocks. The
Following the Map by Robert Ward Read More »
“Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.” — Eleanor Roosevelt Yesterday was my birthday. To celebrate, I spent Sunday in San Francisco at LitQuake, attending three panels on the art of memoir, short story and the novel, respectively. Then with two beloved friends, I tromped around the
Censorship or the Market? Read More »
“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” – Angela Carter Reading for Writers: Reading sustains us. Doesn’t it? It inspires us. Sometimes, as BWW member Leslie Rodd
Instinct v Intellect: What the Writer Must Know Writing is a dance between the instinct and the intellect, between vision, dream, a sense of story and the power of the mind to make sense, to figure out, to order. Both are magical and necessary ingredients in creation. But they tend to battle each other—at least
Doors Open: Craft Your Draft, Intellect V Instinct, and a Free Class Read More »
I’ve been looking forward to this day from the moment I realized that summer was not going to be the open expanse of time and respite I’d imagined. And now it is here. But here, too, is the feral novel I sent off and then ignored. Here are a few lines of direction from my
This week I finished reading a complex, important, heavy novel called A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra. The subject is Chechnya during the war (1994-2004) and the web of characters affected by this war. It was a deeply moving novel, and an inspiring work in terms of its construction and prose style, how
The Books You Are Meant to Write: A Guest Blog by Leslie Rodd Read More »
All of these come alive, of course, with examples. So next week (or in my class at Book Passage on Saturday), examples will follow. Also, please post your own 100 words of dialog (including description, action and gesture, of course), below and I will edit/ comment on it. Or you may just share it for
7 Key Principles of Dialog Read More »
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