Lit Lesson #15: Incorporating Feedback

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...

Flight School Lit Lesson Submission Guidelines:

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...

Lit Lesson #14: God of Small Things

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...

Lit Lesson #13: How Do I Get Published?

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...

Lit Lesson # 12: Classic Stories that Miss the Mark and Why

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...

Lit Lesson #11: Is Moral Transformation in Story a “Radical” Notion?

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...

Lit Lesson #10: Thoughts on Contemporary Memoir

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...

Lit Lesson #9: What I Learned from the Novel, There There, by Tommy Orange

Best Novel Writing Courses to Help You Craft a Bestselling Novel We’ve wrapped three weeks on this book, and I’ve taught nine classes with about thirty writers, examining the novel from nearly every craft perspective possible: Plot, voice, POV, and structure while asking through teacherly questions like: Can we find a hero in a book with twelve characters? Can we find a plot from the deck of plots we study? Is there a structure that adheres to the three part form? But this was also a teaching...

Lit Lesson #8: To Write with Passion, Temper those Passions

Best Creative Writing Classes Online: Write With Purpose & Passion In a class, quite recently, I signed into the Zoom call late and those already present were deep into a Covid discussion. Usually, I start class with upbeat music and silly dance moves—my on-line equivalent of the sage smudging techniques you might find in Native American traditions or in many spiritual communities—but as I increased the volume, the tide of conversation increased too, in volume and misery and division and...

Lit Lesson #7: The Canon- Mine/Yours

Creating a Solid Foundation for Your Writing – Virtual Writing Classes In reading Henry Jameses, The Turn of the Screw, all the writers in the Studio bandied about this term: The Canon. From ThoughtCo, I found this definition: “In fiction and literature, the canon is the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre. The collected works of William Shakespeare for instance, would be part of the canon of western literature, since his writing and writing style has...