On Logophilia and Process By Stephen Mead See his work in Vol IV. #7 Just as some have a natural proclivity for math or sports, I have had one for actual words since an early age. “Chrysalis” was a particular favorite, the name of an old Jethro Tull record – I remember the icon on the…
Category: on prose writing
Information vs. Emotion in Memoir
Writing about Dreams, Loss, Fatherhood & Farming By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor One fall day, I sat down to write about my family’s experiences in Appalachian Ohio, where we lived and worked and were part-time farmers for thirteen years. It took me a year and a half to produce a manuscript of 500 pages. It took me…
Pulling From the Screen
Writing: The Cinematic Technique By Sarah Chauncey One of the benefits of having worked in so many mediums – print, television, stage, online, stand-alone interactive and film – is that I’ve learned a variety of storytelling techniques transferable between platforms. The combination of having been a stage manager, TV writer/producer and film critic contributed to my becoming…
Fictional Characters and Autobiography Part 2
Five Approaches to Revising Character See part one here By Elissa Field Again, not all authorial characters are broken — but this post addresses the situation where characters drawn closely from the author come across as flat. Each of the following presents a possible source of the problem and how to address it. See-through narrator: beginner’s error? In…
Fictional Characters and Autobiography– Part 1
Writing Character: One Most Like Yourself By Elissa Field The impetus for this article arose from a small tangent during a fabulous workshop I participated in with author Ann Hood. Among stories I’ve worked on in the past, I knew who my trickiest, most elusive or least successful characters were, but hadn’t noticed a pattern until an offhand comment…
Writing: Mind the Gap!
Plot Holes By Jon Simmonds Plot holes, those devious little blighters, have a knack of popping into existence just where you least expect them. I am not the kind of chap who outlines a novel before jumping in to the fun of writing it. Broad brush strokes, a skeleton framework of ideas and then it’s…
Storyboarding
The Layout of a Novel By Nat Russo A few weeks ago, as I began storyboarding the sequel to my novel, Necromancer Awakening (my bestselling dark fantasy, now available on Amazon) I came across the Story Forge Cards website, watched the video tutorials, and couldn’t wait to give them a try. After using them for a couple of…
Retreat West
Creating the Writing Retreat I Wanted by Amanda Saint [dropcap]I[/dropcap]t all started when I went a bit mad. London life had got to me. Insomnia for two long years, extortionate rent, no proper darkness, endless noise. So when I flipped out one day over a minor issue–we’re talking wailing, screaming, throwing and kicking things (very…
Yossi Waxman | Novel Excerpt
Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye I Die a Little From a novel by Yossi Waxman Translated by Baruch Gefen Paintings by Yossi Waxman [dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen I was young, I believed there is life, real life, with awareness and understanding and love, and even hatred… I believed there is life in rocks and trees and flowers and…
Woven Tale Press Editor Jo Ely | In Her Own Words
Writing My First Novel Jo Ely [dropcap]I[/dropcap]f truly committed, one can always find time to write–poet Salena Godden gets up at 4 am, and short story writer and novelist Jacqueline Crooks would write on buses and trains, commuting to her seven-day-a-week job. Not many people have that kind of commitment, and I am no exception. I…
David Gaffney | In His Own Words
[dropcap]D[/dropcap]avid Gaffney comes from Cleator Moor in West Cumbria and now lives in Manchester. The Guardian says that “One-hundred-and-fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.” He is the author of several books of fiction and flash fiction, including Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), Never Never (2008), The Half-Life of…
Writing—an elusive art of wisps and webs
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]riting is such an elusive art. Writers are often cagey about the origin of their creations when asked where the story started. Not every story is explainable. There are the kinds that start with a wisp of an idea, which is flushed out after years of research. Other stories draw the writer into its web,…