Archive for January 2013
Mini Workshop — Conflict in Narrative
Today’s blog is a mini-workshop for writers, on the subject of conflict in narrative. For emerging writers, one of the most important aspects of story-telling is conflict. Something has to happen in a narrative, and what happens has to matter. By which I mean that whatever your protagonist wants has to be IMPORTANT — it…
Read MoreAiming For Oblivion
Today a woman told me she didn’t think she had a drinking problem because she never drank to feel better, or even to get high, the way others did; she drank so she didn’t have to feel anything. She found her emotions intolerable, and she drank aiming for oblivion. She wasn’t an alcoholic, she said,…
Read MoreGreat Way to Start the Morning
Because I am a little neurotic and insecure and oscillate between wanting to be left alone to write and wanting people to remember I exist — in short, you know, a WRITER — I have a Google alert set up. Sometimes it brings me wonderful things, as it did this morning when I was alerted…
Read MoreWhat To Do? What To Do?
I had a phone chat recently with a writer friend of mine. We both have books coming out this spring and are both dealing with the pre-publication jitters. His editor called him to say a blurb for the book had come in and it was a really nice blurb, but the ‘blurbist’ had suggested “a…
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