Master the Art of Writing With Online Classes for Adults Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens has, as of this posting, spent ninety four weeks on the NYT Best Seller list. That’s almost two years running. People have strong opinions about this book; “Loved it,” “Couldn’t stand it,” “Haunting,” “Trite,” “Memorable.” No matter what you feel about a book, you can always learn from it, as Stephen King says. In fact, King...
Fragments: Courses in Creative Writing With Handout A short post, but a good one with the meat in the actually recording from class. This was pre-pandemic and I hope you enjoy a vintage class! We spent a week discussing fragments at the Studio, and it was such a good conversation that I decided to create a small teaching for those of you who are not in class with us. To help you get the most out of it, there is a handout that you can print. You must click on the link and then download the...
Lit Lesson on Getting an Agent: Best Writing Classes Though publishing ins’t, and shouldn’t be, the primary measure of artistic worth, it goes a long way toward affirming one’s status as a writer. ~ C. Michael Curtis, Publishers and Publishing. On Writing Short Storiesedited by Tom Bailey Studio III’s Becky Ellis secured a literary agent for her first memoir with the working title: At War with my Father. This posting in a Q & A format is about how she went about the...
Defamiliarization refers to a writer’s taking an everyday object that we all recognize and, with a wave of his or her authorial magic wand, rendering that same object weirdly unfamiliar to us—strange even. Presto change-o, our perspective shifts and we see the object in a new way. A pretty neat magic trick, if you ask us. The word defamiliarization was coined by the early 20th-century Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Technique.” He argued that...
Get Published With Confidence: Essential Writing Advice If you are a writer studying at the Studio, you know I’ve been promising a resource list to help ease your way toward submitting your work. It’s here, at last, and I must thank Joseph from Studio III, because he pulled it all together for me. Many balk at submitting, due to the fear. IE: You might believe your work is not good enough yet, or you have a terror of rejection. But submitting, ironically, is a terrific way to get...
The Best Online Writing Workshops at Blackbird Studio for Writers Welcome to Blackbird and specifically, to this site for Flight School Lit Lessons which is a series of posts from the Best Online Writing Workshops offered here at Blackbird, largely by the teachers, but also by the students with something to offer and share that they’ve learned and put into practice in their own writing. Comments are welcome and appreciated (though vetted too). NOTE: If you are a student who would like to...
