Monthly Archive: April 2013

Spring Changes Everything

Spring Changes Everything

There is something in the air. It’s spring. Sure we still have rain and storms, but the world feels different in spring. Maybe it’s the flowers pushing up or the leaf buds showing color. It might be the grass looking green and shaggy or the sky a deeper blue. Whatever it is, it inspires me to get outside, to feel a change in the crispness, to investigate the neighborhood, to inhale the changes around me. Regardless of the drizzle,  I know spring will affect a change in my writing. Change is good. Give yourself a pat-on-the-back as you use those...

Before AND After

Before AND After

This writing exercise helped me deepen my story. Five minutes or a day before a traumatic event, characters have no inkling of what is to come. Their lives follow their day-to-day routies then, Wham! A major traumatic event arrives. So… Write that calm. Soothe the reader so that when the trauma arrives, the reader is doubly shaken. After the traumatic event has been exposed, write the after. Go back to the calm and use elements from that time as contrast to reactions/actions that followed the trauma. Example: Marta was kneading bread (mundane activity)before hearing the news of a good friend’s...

Quotes to Ponder

Quotes to Ponder

Kristin Hannah’s book, Angel Falls, provides us with a lot to think about: p.111 He’d never thought much about silence, but now he knew its every shape and contour. It was a cheap glass jar that trapped old voices and kept them fresh. p.149 The measure of a man comes down to moments spread out like dots of paint on the canvas of life. p.331 The falling apart of a man’s life should make noise. p.375 Love wasn’t a great burning brush fire that swept across your soul and charred you…it was everyday moments laid out like bricks, one atop...