My author dreams began with my obsession with reading. I’m a book fangirl at heart, so it won’t come as a surprise that I love the Reading with Purpose tenet of DIY MFA (side note: I really love all three tenets, but reading will always hold a little edge on the others). When I first… Read more »
Something about the back-to-school season gets me thinking about big projects for myself. And, like many word nerds, the way I prep for a big project is to read about it. I’ve found it useful to create a syllabus, a list of required reading, for my writing project to keep me on track and to… Read more »
While writing Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory and Family, the basic question was how to braid the stories of childhood, memory, and what came after for an immigrant family and in turn, what it meant to the reader. Is it a voyeuristic look at a country that’s foreign to the reader? Is it… Read more »
Falling In Love I fell in love for the first time in July – there were fireworks (literal and figurative) and I wanted nothing more in my whole thirteen years of living than to kiss that boy. Growing up in a small Atlantic Canadian province I hold snapshots of summer in my memory – the… Read more »
In my last article Poetry Can Change the World, I make an argument about how vital poetry still is, even in our mad-pace world. Or, lately, just our ‘mad’ world, am I right? In this article I am going to compare poetry to espresso. Hear me out. Maybe it’s my lingering ADHD, maybe it’s my… Read more »
Hey writers! In my past few articles we’ve been studying how to read with a purpose, and a fantastic way of leveling up our reading analysis skills is using the Story Grid Scene Analysis Template. As a quick reminder for readers who aren’t familiar with the Story Grid Scene Analysis Template, take a few minutes… Read more »
[Editor’s Note: As a part of DIY MFA’s ongoing missions to promote unique voices, regular columnist, Sara Farmer, has been conducting a limited series of interviews featuring authors with unique and diverse voices. You can check out her past interviews of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Marcie Rendon.] About Ausma Zehanat Khan Ausma Zehanat Khan is the… Read more »
Writing a memoir is not easy. Like any genre, we need a compelling narrative arc driven by good scenes full of sensory details and great dialog. But we also need to create meaning from experience and offer takeaways for our readers. We need to claim our own emotional truth. Negative critics jabber away in our… Read more »
If you’ve been following my last two articles on scene analysis, you know how valuable I believe it is for writers to understand how to determine if a scene either advances the plot and/or develops the character(s). This is especially important if it is the opening chapter of a novel. Before I became a Certified… Read more »
Writers know that reading is essential to growing their craft, but did you know there’s a difference between reading for fun and reading analysis? When I became a Certified Story Grid Editor in 2019 (Story Grid is an editing methodology that provides practical tools and tips to help writers in the writing process), this understanding… Read more »
