The Butler Method: Best Online Creative Writing Courses From Flight School & One more thing about scene: This is a nearly abandoned beach and this four by four foot sign makes the rules pretty clear: Yet, as I walk on the wet sand, I take note of truck tire tracks, bike tracks, and what else do I see up ahead in the bear grass…is that a woman trudging through the dry sand (in the nesting area of the endangered birds)…with a dog that is off leash? Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. It’s not my...
Online Writing Lessons to Enhance Your Writing Skills “O where shall I find a virtuous woman, for her price is above rubies.” Proverbs 31:10 I knew The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark would be trouble when a writer wrote a hilarious text that read, “I want to claw my eyes out.” ???? ???? ???? True, it is extraordinarily hard to connect with this book and yet, if one can place this dark satire in the proper context, the story is chillingly familiar. First and foremost,...
Unraveling the Plot of Oh Pioneers: Writing Classes for Adults …the time will come when she’ll be ranked above Hemingway. ~ Leon Edel “My God, girl, what a head of hair!” he exclaimed, quite innocently and foolishly. She stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness and drew in her lower lip, most unnecessary severity… …and we are off on a story about Alexandra the only daughter of a Swedish farmer about to die. Alexandra was an unusual heroine of her...
Improve Your Writing: Creative Writing Courses for Beginners After that first time up to read, I developed a system of going through the commentary from Tom and the other writers page by page and transferring all their marks onto a my master set of pages. Praise. Typographical errors. Line edits. Everything. Next, I sat down and typed the feedback into my computer copy. If a suggestion bugged me, I didn’t cast it aside. Rather, I looked at this feedback a couple extra times to see what bugged...
Writing Advice From Writers: Submission Guidelines “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ~ Anais Nin If you are on the path to becoming a published writer, Blackbird is devoted to supporting you with a format for publication: Flight School Lit Lessons. This isn’t just a blog, or newsletter (as some call it). This is a place to capture the teachings here at the Studio and bring them into concrete form. It is also a place for you to share your voice through...
Best Writing Courses to Master Storytelling Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one. ~ John Berger This Berger quote opens The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, a literary novel released in 1997 that went on to win the Booker Prize. It was Roy’s first book, and took her many years to write (you can certainly deduce this when you note her remarkable care and attention to detail and language). This post is the result of three weeks of conversation...
From Draft to Publication: The Value of Manuscript Review “…don’t worry about publication…” ~ Abigail Thomas If I had a nickel for the number of times I’ve been asked this question, well, you know the rest. But it still comes at me year after year. “How do I get published?” It’s an important question, a necessary question, a bit of a driving-question because we writers want to cross that finish line. But often a writer asks the question...
Best Writing Tips for Classic Stories That Miss the Mark We dance around in a ring and suppose; but the secret sits in the middle and knows. ~ Robert Frost Out here among the trees and wide open sky and the endless chatter of birds nesting, I’ve been thinking about the way we have come to accept the simple conclusions offered in a lot of our best stories. I’m talking about easy endings like the girl gets the guy or the other way around. Fame is achieved. A house purchased. Or the...
Transformative Storytelling: Best Writing Advice What YOU already know about good storytelling thanks to your study of structure and plot We’ve wrapped two weeks of study on the Tolstoy short story, Master and Man, which came to us from the collection of Russian stories contained in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by G. Saunders. And this is the last story we’ll be studying too. It was a doozy… Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy I read Master and Man and did so multiple...
Good Writing Tips and Reflections on Contemporary Memoir (This post, Thoughts on Contemporary Memoir, comes from Flight School, a site devoted to teachings for memoir writers) Confession time…I don’t read a lot of memoir these days. ???? I’ve read many, many over the years, and many novels too. And, I devoted myself to reading a pile of memoirs when writing my own. BUT…I don’t read many contemporary memoirs because I find myself feeling…well…how to say this kindly…put back. I want to...
