Writing tips Our Love of Writing Readerless writing changes us. When writers—and I refer to everyone who writes as a writer, regardless of whether they publish their work—describe writing as therapeutic or spiritual, usually they’ve experienced…
Writing tips A Sense of Place A haunting sense of place should ripple off any good memoir once the cover’s closed, and you may reopen the front again as you would a gate to another land.…
Writing tips “Nothing Really Happens Until I Write” Artists have long spoken of “the Muse,” inspiration personified. According to Webster’s, the Muse was “any of the nine sister…
Writing tips “Creative” Writing – by Frederick Buechner The following meditation is from a talk on the occasion of the presentation of the Whiting Writers' awards: SOMETIME IN THE early 1950s, for two years running, I taught creative…
Writing tips The Flashback Structure In terms of basic book shape, I’ve used the same approach in all three of mine: I start with a flash forward that shows what’s at stake emotionally for me…
Writing tips Always Writing I am always writing but not always writing a book. Days come when I am hitting in the cage, trying…
Writing tips Follow A Process The healthy creative life follows a process… • What do I know about the process of creativity? • What have I discovered about my personal part in that process? •…
Writing tips Life Itself Has a Plot - by Frederick Buechner The alphabet of grace is full of sibilants-sounds that can't be shouted but only whispered: the sounds of bumblebees and wind and lovers in the…
Marketing tips, Publishing tips, Writing tips “Platform is not a stepping stone. It is the finish line.” That’s a powerful-and powerfully counterintuitive-way to think about your work. And the reason more people don’t think in this manner is because they are afraid. They’re afraid of carving their…
Writing tips Hurry is not a proper posture for a writer Good writing takes time. “Words not only convey something, but are something,” observes Frederick Buechner. They “have color, depth, texture of their own, and the power to evoke vastly more…
Marketing tips, Publishing tips, Writing tips Who Are You Aiming For? In the raw, conceptual phase, it was essential that you had some idea who you were making your work for – an unaimed arrow rarely hits a target. The intended…
Writing tips Culture and Community by Natasha Sistrunk Robinson When the people and values that shape my diverse communities are in conflict with each other, I must consider: Will I remain true to my…
Marketing tips, Publishing tips, Writing tips Screening In ancient times culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation, and rhetoric instilled in oral societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate,…
Writing tips Pay Attention! by Frederick Buechner In just the same way faith could be called a kind of whistling in the dark too, of course. The living out of faith. The writing out…
Writing tips When Does A Book Proposal Come in the Writing Process? - by Angela Scheff A reader asked: How far along in the book writing process should you be before submitting a book proposal? The answer to this is in the…
Writing tips Art Can’t Be Hurried I was reading a work by the great writer Stefan Zweig. In it, he recounts a youthful conversation with an older and wiser friend. The friend was encouraging him to…
Writing tips It Isn’t Easy Sometimes people say they are not sure they can be creative on paper every day. I tell them with all seriousness I am not sure I can be creative on…
Writing tips Tomorrow Tomorrow the sun will rise, God willing, and it will be time again for us to go to our tables. It will be time to pick up the pen or…
Writing tips “How Do You Write a Memoir?” Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, “I really want to have sex, where do I start?” What one person fantasizes about would ruin the…
Writing tips Go Slow Of the nearly eight million words that have floated through my head onto a page, some of which have been deemed publishable, I am happy with about four dozen sentences.…
