Tag: fiction writing
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The Art of Fiction Writing, Part 2: You Must Dream
Here I discuss writing how-to books, the ones I like in particular. I also talk about the writing process–what it’s like to dedicate your days to your story or poems. Hours up hours, you work until something in your brain clicks–the story comes alive in your skull. I also share with you one of my…
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The Art of Writing Fiction 1
So, you’ve got a great story that you want to tell. It’s all made up, complete fiction, and you’re ready and raring to hit the computer keys and crank out a three hundred page novel. Or a ten page short story. Or a novella of eighty, ninety, one hundred pages. You’ve got the story in…
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TWB Podcast: What Is Aesthetics? And Why Should a Writer Care?
In class, we talk a lot about aesthetics, or the study of art–both appreciating it and creating it. It’s something the writer (the literary writer) is thinking about all the time, even if she doesn’t know she is. Walk with me into the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, where I once held a classroom with a…
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Writers: Keep Your Day Job
When I tell someone that I’ve finished writing a novel, sometimes they ask, “So, when’s it coming out?” They know I have a number of novels already published. In their minds, I am an established writer, and each novel I produce ultimately goes to market. This ain’t the case, at all. The writing world is…
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Fiction: Pick a Chaos, Any Chaos
Every novel needs a little chaos in it. That’s what ignites the story. The novel begins with a character or two in their regular, everyday lives (that could be anything from a pimp drinking coffee at Starbucks, to an astronaut doing her daily orbit around Mars). Then something happens to them, an event or a…