A few weeks ago, in the post about setting, I shared with you a mnemonic I used with my students to help them remember the important parts of a story: Cows See Pretty Sunflowers. Cows = Characters See = Setting Pretty = Problem Sunflowers = Solution All these things are necessary to have a good story.…
If you dig into a writing group, you’ll likely discover two camps: short story writers and novelists. Short story writers specialize in a greater number of short pieces of fiction (let’s say up to 10,000 words), while novelists spend their time writing fewer long works (an “average” adult novel is 80,000 – 100,000 words). Writers…
Back when I was an elementary school teacher, I created a mnemonic device to help my students remember to include all the story elements in their retells: Cows See Pretty Sunflowers. I didn’t say it was a great mnemonic. But it worked. Cows = Characters See = Setting Pretty = Problem Sunflowers = Solution They drew…
Nothing beats the feeling of typing The End following the last scene of your manuscript. You’ve spent weeks to months to years laboring over sentence construction, timeline details, and character development, among many other things. Now is the time to celebrate. Because soon, it will be time to edit. If you’re groaning, stop it. This…
Stephen King says a lot of quote-worthy things. Many of them are true. The one I think is the most true is this: Writers must be readers. It’s how we learn from the masters. I know this is true because I’ve been a voracious reader since I could first decode words. My absolute favorite book…
This is a Thanksgiving post. There are others like it but this one is mine. Several readers of this blog live in other countries – Canada, England, and Australia, to name a few. I obviously don’t know what American Thanksgiving looks like from your perspective, but from here it looks something like one of…
Confession: I didn’t jump onto the whole “The Walking Dead” bandwagon until recently. Next confession: It was a message series at church that got me on board. But maybe that should be their confession. I was a slow adopter of TWD because it’s such a fad – I never watched it, but all I had…
A few have asked me if I’ll be participating in NaNoWriMo this year (that’s National Novel Writing Month, for anyone scratching their heads). It’s a really big freaking deal among writerly types. So much so that not participating can make one feel left out. Alone. A little loser-ish. But everyone else is doing it, they…
Have you read a story where the character knew everything that was going on and merely went through a checklist to solve the problem? I certainly hope not, because that would be boring as hell. No matter the genre, we read stories to see how the main character emerges victoriously (or not). Does the detective…
When you dream, how do you experience the dream world? Are you yourself? Do you see things from your own eyes or from the outside? What kinds of dreams stick with you after you wake up? Do you jump out of your head and into someone else’s, mid-dream? If you were taken aback by that…
Allison Maruska 