Some time ago, I came to a realization that made me go from having a visceral hatred of poetry to suddenly rediscovering its beauty. The realization was this: It’s not that I dislike all poetry, I just dislike bad poetry. Let me backtrack a little bit. It’s 1993 and I’m in ninth grade biology class… Read more »
Today, to kick off the Master Class blog series on Poetry and Verse Novels, we have an fabulous guest post by Leslie Bulion. I first discovered Leslie’s work at BEA (BookExpo America) last year, where I came across a copy of her book At the Sea Floor Cafe. From the minute I picked up the… Read more »
Whether it’s in an auditorium in front of hundreds of people or in your living room with a couple of close friends, reading your work in public can be nerve-wracking. In fact, even writers who have been speaking in public for years still get nervous when they have to read their own work aloud. I… Read more »
The violin and I have a love-hate relationship. I started playing at age 4, and have continued on and off for over 30-or-so years. Some of the time this was by choice, other times… not so much. After all, how much choice do you really have when you’re 4? It scares me a little to… Read more »
This week, we’re talking about description and detail. On Monday we established that Description Equals Does Not Equal Exposition. Today we’re going to discuss how to make those descriptive passages more powerful. Here are five tips, plus a writing exercise at the end to help you put them into action. 1) Engage the Five Senses…. Read more »
Dialogue is easy to spot because it has those nifty little quotation marks, but not all text that isn’t dialogue can be lumped together. The difference between description and exposition can be tricky to determine but it is most definitely there. The key is to remember this equation: How can we distinguish between description and… Read more »
If you have a blog, then you need an editorial calendar. Sure, it’s good to leave a little room for flexibility and spontaneity and you could even get away with winging it for a while. Sooner or later, though, if you want your blog to be an effective part of your author platform, you need… Read more »
This past weekend, I had to do something that pained me at my very core: I decided to remove blogs from my Google Reader. I realized I had been following so many blogs that I had no chance of actually reading them all (the number was upwards of one thousand, I think). For some time,… Read more »
Some writers embraced it from the beginning. Others of us have been skeptical, but we can’t fight it anymore. Like it or not, social media has become firmly entrenched in the lives of writers, and it’s here to stay. It can be an overwhelming proposition to jump into social media or try out a new… Read more »
This week we’ve discussed how to submit your work. While we’ve focused on submitting to literary magazines and online literary markets, many of the same ideas also apply when querying agents. Today’s prompt works equally well, whether you’re a writer of short fiction or poetry and looking for markets for your work, or if you’re… Read more »
