A creative writing teaching on fantastic foreshadowing or marvelous misdirection, an unsatisfying heroine, and what you can steal for your own work in progress by Studio Peer Mentor and Teaching Assistant April Streeter Fantastic Foreshadowing…or Lucrezia, the young protagonist in The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, is a compelling character in great danger. The reader meets her on a winter evening in 1561 and is told in the author’s ‘historical note’ that Lucrezia...
On mentor support & the nitty gritty about track-changes, Word and Scrivener, and how to submit pgs. Remember: Scrivener for composition. Word for submission. To connect to April or Carolyn, email april.streeter@gmail.com or cjbiemer@gmail.com To learn more about Peer Mentorship, click here Lit Lessons are posts from the ongoing teachings offered here at Blackbird, largely by the teachers, but also by students with something to share about what they’ve learned. Comments welcome and...
Creative Writing Workshop: Consecution is a fancy way of saying “sequencing” “Consecution” (is a) re-describing (of) the compositional process, how the repetition of words and sequences of events progress toward a naturally developed story with a coherent plot structure…(which is not)…different from the advice of the classicists — …good writing is, after all, good writing. Lish’s genius is in making it strange that we might see it better. ~ From The Consecution of Gordon Lish by...
Creative Writing Workshop on Reading, Character/Plot and the Divine Feminine. Buckle up “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~Stephen King On Reading: Again and again, I meet writers in my creative writing teaching program who balk at taking the time to read. Or listen, to a book. Or, if they do get in there, they sabotage the learning process by judging the work as “boring, confusing, overwhelming,” and putting...
Publishing Advice for Creative Writers Six months Eighty queries Fifteen rejections based on the query (meaning they didn’t read a word of the book) Two rejections based on a full read Three query letter revisions One major meltdown One re-write I finally, finally, FINALLY found an agent for my fifth memoir, The Summer of ‘72. Robert Difirio of D4EO Literary. Bob is an old-school agent with five-plus decades of experience in the business and a corral of intelligent, hard-working writers doing...
“I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.” ~ Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye This is our annual update on each other’s summer. Send a photo or two and let us know what you’ve been up to! SUSAN C/SII From Susan C in SII and living in CT: In between writing, painting, Library meetings, short trips and volunteering, I work on my 1500-piece never ending jigsaw puzzle of Van Gogh’s Starry...
When a Memoir is for the Writer and Not the Reader I wrote the book quickly and without—oh dear, I hate to admit this—too much thought. I barely revised. I knew everything about the story before I even started. Novels are agony. Life is agony, but for me writing the memoir was not. ~ E. McCracken Elizabeth McCracken who studied in Iowa, is a fellow of this and a nominee of that, and yes, a remarkably talented wordsmith. See for yourself. She’s also witty and wry in the classic tradition...
Writing Workshop: The Attack Sentence, Plot, and the Underlying Message of an Epic A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly...
Studio Writers Share Process “For dramatic impact we must be grounded in place and experience the illusion of real-time passing, which only occurs in scenes. We must live the moment along with the characters, especially in moments of change…While summaries supply the connective tissue, scenes are the blood and breath of fiction, narrative essays, and memoir.” From Showing vs. Telling by Laurie Alberts It went on for sixteen weeks. This teaching on scene. I was studying with Tom Spanbauer in...
How can a student of creative writing search for and find plot in a book? This excellent novel, one of the best I have enjoyed since Shipping News by Annie Proulx and Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, was recommended for study this year by Jean in SIII. Jean is a historical novelist in the thick of research and writing her novel from the time of the revolutionary war, and she has an innate sense of good writing! At first, I was hesitant to read a book titled “A novel of the...
