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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
