Notes on a creative writing life
Wow! The beat goes on! Molten meltdown of mental memes send me searching shelves for slender volumes.
I’ve tried reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac three times in my life. I forced myself to finish it last time. But apparently I was reading the wrong Kerouac or the wrong format.
My 1st choice for second period [...]
My first Write-O-Rama workshop was “Pare It Down” with Anne Leigh Parrish. A workshop to get us to write simply and therefore strongly. Think Hemingway. Not one of my favorites. Not as pathetically macho as Mailer, but too focused so-called “masculine” values for me.
The idea was to choose strong words; words of one syllable. If [...]
The Write-O-Rama is a full-day smorgsbord of 1-hour workshops run as fundraiser for the Richard Hugo House. I arrived early. You never know about traffic and ferries coming from the Olympic Peninsula. Whenever I’m confident I’ll make a specific ferry that’s when I end up behind a caravan of RVs driven by near-sighted [...]
In one of those “Be Careful What You Wish For” parables, I’ve spent most of this year being terribly useful. Shortly after I started working on my NaNoWriMo revisions in February, I was hired to fill-in as Interim Executive Director for an area Chamber of Commerce during a particularly nasty internal dust-up. (Bit like the [...]
John Truby’s screenwriting courses and software are a staple of screenwriting classes worldwide. His book,The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, presents his “Twenty-Two Building Blocks” plot structure is a classic. I purchased one of his first video writing courses mumblety-mumblety years ago when I was writing comedy and spent a [...]
The plan was to spend January completing the first draft of a memoir and then going back to work on the NaNoWriMo novel revisions. That was the plan.
I did, however, get to work tangentially on writing. A friend asked me to be a beta reader on the first draft of her first novel. She’s published [...]
I’ve seen dozens of variations on these (and I’ll be posting at least 3) through the years as I read writing books and went to classes and workshops to avoid facing the muddle that was my middle, but somehow Janice MacDonald’s version clicked. I then joined NaNoWriMo in 2007 followed by a friend asking me [...]
Made it! It’s official. I got my 50,000 words (actually, 53,000+ words) at 11:35 p.m. tonight. Must now sleep.
The novel’s not quite done, but the end is in sight and I feel confident I’ll actually make it.
I’ll write more tomorrow.
I only got a couple of hundred words today because I’m desperately working on writing some training materials for a presentation on Monday. I’m taking a bit of extra effort on the materials because I hope to recycle them on my web site and with other clients, but it’s proving an enormous time and energy [...]
Actually, the title is misleading. I fell short of my personal Day 1 goal of 2,700 words. That’s what I need to average per day to complete over 80,000 words. I know NaNoWriMo is only 50K words, but I’m wanting to complete a full first draft, so I would need to shoot for the 80K.
But [...]
