Discover Your Voice With Our Creative Writing Short Courses Online “To be a whole writer, a truly creative writer, we access the life we understand through lived experience and use it to feed what we write, from fiction to memoir to lyric to poetry to screenplays. If you understand your own life, you can better understand the lives of the characters you hope to write about.” – Jennifer Lauck I’ll Never Write About My Life And why I’m writing now what I swore I never would By Carolyn...
Looking For Help With Writing a Novel? Our Foundations Program is a Great Choice! FAQ Bones The Foundations program at the Studio enables new writers to learn the culture, the shared language, and the overall philosophy of Blackbird. We are here to help good writers become great and the Foundations sets you up for success with ten weeks of study in Bones and five in Scene vs. Exposition. A few common questions: How much work will be expected of me in this class? If I’m a beginner, will...
Ten Reasons Why Blackbird Is One of the Best Online Writing Schools https://blackbirdstudiopdx.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Why-BB-Long-Form.mp4 1. Community 2. Craft 3. Structure 4. Support 5. Kindness 6. Professionalism 7. Developing a plan 8. Clarity 9. Affordability 10. Inspiration Join us in a class by clicking here...
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...
