|
|
I’ve had a terrible time figuring out how to BEGIN my book—when I arrive in Paris to begin modeling? In San Francisco when the agent proposes I go? At home in Michigan with my family? (To show my reasons for leaving). I’ve played with each of those scenarios and none has quite worked. One of […]
There will be a few changes around Writerland in 2010, the first of which is the introduction of contests! I’ll also be adding some non-writing posts in the next week, and in February … a new design! So let’s get started. The prize for January’s contest is your choice of one of the books below. […]
If you’re a writer, you’ve probably read, or at least heard of, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Wayin which she advocates writing “morning pages”—three pages of scribbling whatever is on your mind, by hand, in order to clear your mind of the clutter that’s blocking all your brilliant creative thoughts. Those morning pages may begin, “I’m […]
While I’ve attended a couple writing conferences, the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, my friend Christine over at 80,000 words is much more experienced in this department and has offered to write a guest post about writing residencies and conferences. Enjoy!
Finding space (psychic and physical) and […]
Julia Scheeres is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Jesus Land, published in 2006. Today she is working on a book titled Jonestown, due out in 2011.
(Jonestown was a utopian community formed by Americans in Guyana, South America, under the leadership of a Bay Area preacher named Jim Jones. On […]
Last Monday’s post on “that” vs. “which” and “I” vs. “me” led to some interesting comments about other words people often confuse. Here is the list with a few more added. They’re in no particular order.
1. Irregardless—this is not a word! It’s regardless, regardless of how much emphasis you want to put on it.
[…]
After gathering this list of craft books from my writing friends, I decided to revisit some of my favorites to see which bits of advice have had the greatest impact on my writing habits.
This passage from Annie Lamott’s Bird by […]
I am reluctant to get too much into copyediting because I am a stickler for grammatical and other errors, and I hate to get too caught up in that and lose sight of the more important things in a story like plot, dialogue, characters, etc. But here we go. A lot of common mistakes I […]
I asked some writer friends what craft of writing books they recommend, and here is the list in no particular order (although Bird by Bird was by far the most recommended). I’ve read only 13 of them, so I can’t vouch for all of them. Here they are:
1. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
[…]
Now for our editing hour. Here are a few basics:
For beginning writers setting out write a short story, novel or memoir, there are quite a few enduring writing rules that can transform a mediocre piece of work into one that’s readable—in other words, a piece of crap into something kinda good. Here are just […]
|
|
