Category: Writing

Sometimes our writing is stuck because we don’t know where to start. For some of us, we need to know where we are going to end up before we can begin. And if we don’t, the ink has run out, our pencil is down to a nub, our muse is silent, and the battery to our laptop has died.
Continue reading “Cracking the Writer’s Block 3: Playing Balderdash”

So you are a writer with lots of ideas, but don’t know where to start. Or you have no ideas, with the same result. What do you do? Here are a few simple ideas to get you going.
Continue reading “Cracking the Writer’s Block 2: Quick Tips”

A publishing colleague of mine who worked with our book printers was fond of telling me, “With all the things that can go wrong in producing a book, it’s amazing the ink ever hits the page.”

What’s true for printers is true in spades for writers. With so many reasons for writer’s block it’s a miracle anyone writes anything.
Continue reading “Cracking the Writer’s Block 1: Fear, Success and Life”

My wife murders clichés. But because these are unpremeditated, we should probably reduce the charges to manslaughter.
Continue reading “I’ll Have a Cliché with a Twist, Please”

Bobby Fischer was a World Chess Champion who stood out as an eccentric genius in a field full of eccentric geniuses. As portrayed in the movie Pawn Sacrifice, he walked out of a chess match complaining about the lighting, ransacked his own hotel rooms looking for bugging devices, thought the Russians were watching him through his TV and believed the US government was listening to him through (wait for it) his dental fillings. Though his mother was Jewish, he was vocally anti-Semitic, holding to many conspiracy theories about Jews.
Continue reading “Bobby Fischer Played Tennis”

“The war tried to kill us in the spring.” From the first sentence of The Yellow Birds, we know that we are in capable hands. Kevin Powers is the well-named author who uses his formidable talent with understated power.
Continue reading “Understated Powers”

What’s the best way to hurt the local agriculture market in a country full of starving people? Indiscriminantly give away tons of free food. Relief organizations have learned the hard way that if they want to create a self-sustaining market of locally grown produce, they can’t always bring in truckloads of rice from other countries.
Continue reading “How to Kill Off Writing”

In the musical 1776 there’s a classic scene in which Thomas Jefferson starts his solitary work of drafting the Declaration of Independence. Quill in hand, he scribbles down a line, looks at it, then crumples up the paper and throws it on the floor. He sits a moment, thinking, and then scribbles another line. Again, dissatisfied, he throws that on the floor. Then just as he’s about to make a third attempt, but before he even writes one word, he crumples up the paper and throws it down.
Continue reading “Finding an Opening”

Beginnings matter. A writer in search of a way to pull readers in need look no further than a strong opening line. Not all opening lines are created equal. They come in great variety. But they typically arrest attention and set the tone for all that is to come. Here are some of my favorites:
Continue reading “Opening Salvo”

Everybody does it. Besides that, it’s not wrong. In fact, sometimes it can be a beautiful thing. No, I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about ending sentences with a preposition.
Continue reading “That’s Unheard Of!”