One fact about writing stories is that we populate them with characters in various contexts—on a dilapidated farm, in an overcrowded city, on a sailboat out at sea. We put thought and time into shaping relevant scenes, but how often do we consider the flip-side of our writing reality: the context in which we do our work? What’s Our Writing-Context? Surely the time of day, the people we live with, and our nation’s societal/political environment affect our writing on some … Read More »

It’s the holiday season—again—and first up is Thanksgiving. Does this hustle-bustle season mean we writers lay aside our writing? I hope not. Besides the need for some of us to spent time cooking, or traveling great distances to visit family and friends, as writers, in addition to carving turkey, we still need to carve out time to keep the pen moving across paper or the fingers clicking over keyboards. I urge us to give ourselves even ten minutes every day … Read More »

Figures of speech enliven our poems and stories. My favorite is metaphor. There’s an old silly saying, “What’s a metaphor for?” I say metaphors are for doing life-enhancing jobs, like surgeons. Acting as a surgeon, a metaphor can inject life into a tired sentence, replace a worn-out cliché, and heal a broken story. Merriam-Webster tells us metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place … Read More »

What story is really worth writing? Worth spending your time, energy, and imagination on? I like what Susan Sontag says, “The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.” Whenever I read that—it’s on a slip of paper tacked on corkboard above my desk—what comes to mind is flash fiction. It’s bite-size insight. It’s sudden. It surprises. What’s Flash Fiction? Whatever you call a brief prose story, it … Read More »

Do you have a favorite quote, famous saying, or inspirational message in view as you write? How about scraps of paper with words of encouragement taped to your desk? I have a few of these—some old, some new. I love them. I need them. I keep them in plain sight to feed my soul, calm my mind, and keep my fingers moving words into being. A few of my favorite things Here are a few bits within reading distance of … Read More »

Virginia Woolf strikes a pose—in my imagination. She looms large in many writers’ minds as a genius memoir writer and fiction writer, a most important author of the 20th century. She was a founding member of the famed soiree “Bloomsbury Group,” a revolving-door-meetup of writers, philosophers, intellectuals, and artists who regularly shared their work in a part of London called Bloomsbury, hence their name. I imagine it was a writers’ critique group on steroids. Moments of being Whether we are … Read More »