Category: writer reminders
When the book you are reading is littered with sticky notes marking great images, you know you have a writer who sees clearly. Check out Peter Hessler, author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. Through his ‘eyes’, I revisit Fuling, China, a city situated where the Wu River meets the Yangtze. “Fuling is not an easy city. Old people rest on the staircases, panting. To carry anything up the hills is backbreaking work and so the city is full of porters. They haul their loads on bamboo poles balanced across their shoulders, the same way freight was carried...
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...
Writing a pitch for a story or book is a tricky thing: it’s short, it needs to interest the prospective reader and it needs to express the essence of the story without giving away the storyline. It’s short. Write the pitch for your current project. Can you do it in 100 words? 50 words? 25 words? or like an elevator pitch’s 4-seconds? It’s interesting. Could what you write become the grabber listed on the back cover? Your choice of nouns and verbs is critical. It’s an overview. The pitch needs to hint at setting, main character and the story problem....
