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...
