Writing Fiction
Writing to Survive & Building Worlds with Charlie Jane Anders
* Charlie Jane Anders is the author of The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, Tor.com, Wired, and elsewhere. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000…
Read MoreA Treatise on Playfulness
A word on play. A serious word on play. I write this as one who just wrote a craft book. Which might be defined as a lot of thinking about writing: how it happens, why it happens, how to do it, why do it. When I grew up in the early Pleistocene era, there were…
Read MoreGet Inspired by Art with Mary Rakow: Small details have a big impact on your story
by Mary Rakow FURTHER INTRODUCTION TO THIS COLUMN As we saw in the first and second posts, we can find inspiration for secular writing in religious art, and inspiration for religious writing in secular art. Why? Because great art crosses all boundaries and categories. We also saw that once we write a text it starts…
Read MoreProcess and Publishing with Romantic Suspense Author Amanda Clay
Although Amanda Clay writes “genre fiction,” she agreed that most writing falls into one or more genres; so, the term is probably somewhat redundant. Asked about what she likes about writing romance suspense novels, Amanda cited putting her protagonists into difficult situations, creating villains, and human interaction. Amanda explained that a successful romantic subplot –…
Read MoreWrite a Book Starting at the End
By Martha Alderson (Martha Alderson will be teaching at the Writing For Change: Worldwide Craft Conference September 12-13. For more information, please visit the Writing For Change: Worldwide website. Or register here.) Every book is made up of a beginning, middle, and an end. Usually writers start writing at the beginning of their books, a…
Read MoreWriting for Change: Worldwide Coming to You September 7-13!
By Laurie McLean When I took over as director of the San Francisco Writers Conference, the San Francisco Writers Foundation, and the Writing for Change conference a few years ago, little did I realize what challenges awaited me and the rest of the management team in 2020. We barely squeaked by holding the February San…
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