By Dianna Booher My most valuable learning experience in graduate school also happened to be my most humiliating. Having read the first hundred pages of my master’s thesis, one of my thesis directors, a literary prize-winning novelist himself, handed back my novel with downcast eyes and mumbled something about “needs to be tightened.” One line of his review of my …
Five Ways to Tell You’re Not Mrs. Muir
By Cathleen Armstrong Have you seen The Ghost and Mrs. Muir? That 1948 movie about a widow who lives by the sea and writes a book with the help of a ghostly sea captain? From the time I first saw the old film, it was my fantasy to be Mrs. Muir. But the more I wrote, the more it became …
Pruning
by Cynthia Ruchti If fascinates me that the Bible not only inspires and encourages writers, informs the character growth of the writer, but teaches writing techniques, too. The edits for my May 2015 novel-As Waters Gone By-brought that thought into clear focus. As I worked through the notes my editor made, I noticed throw away words or overgrowth that needed …
Rewrites…
By Katherine Reay We like to call them edits. Or perhaps macro-edits, if we want to sound crafty. But sometimes, they are simply re-writes – a ponderous process to push the story where it should have already been. I’ve just been through a bout of these and it was a humbling experience. I tried to push myself and attempt/accomplish new …
Tips to Supercharge Your Story
By DiAnn Mills When our stories lack a certain edge, we’re back to the drawing board looking for what we’ve missed. Our novels are like well-oiled machines, each part has to be fine-tuned to work effectively. When are skills, methods, and storytelling abilities creak and moan, the whole novel comes to a grinding halt. Sometimes we’re able to reach into …
No More Mrs. Nice Guy
by Keli Gwyn Are you too nice to your characters? I was. I used to ache for the characters in the stories I read as the authors forced them to endure one trial after another. When I began writing, I couldn’t do that to my beloved heroes and heroines. I made things easy on them-too easy. I wised up when …