creative writing
September 7, 2008
- It's my turn to give the departmental talk on jobs in creative writing, in a couple weeks. The graduate students in writing will be the main audience--we have masters students and Ph.D.'s in creative writing at the University of Tennessee. The Associated Writing Program website online is the best source I have access to, with its job lists, career articles, and graphs. The link is ...
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August 4, 2008
- I'm in search of an answer. I need to know if anyone can tell me when it became acceptable in the writing of novels, or other creative narrative prose, to drop all use of punctuation.I'm not exactly sure, but I think the trend began with Cormac McCarthy. I enjoyed his novel The Crossing, but found the absence of punctuation somewhat distracting. I recently began reading The Dead Fathers Club by ...
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June 2, 2008
- Last winter, I hit a bump. A big bump. I forgot why I write. Here’s the relevant backstory. I wrote seven novels over twelve years before I found an agent. It was nearly fourteen years before I eventually sold a book. What I want to write about today is what I possess, and what many of you possess, that makes us continue writing and investing ourselves for such long stretches of time without ...
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May 21, 2008
- Well, I've gone and done it. I've spent hours and hours but it's done. My book -- my first novel, published fourteen years ago and soon to come out in a new trade edition -- has been kindled. I'm not very tech savvy, so some of the aspects of getting the book from a printed hardcover (I never had a copyedited version of the novel on disk) to a kindle-loving html file have been trial and error, or ...
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May 6, 2008
- The other card stuck to my monitor is a reminder to be mean. I have a tendency to be way too nice to my characters, because I grow to love them, I guess. So this quote keeps me honest, that is true to life which does not play nice.Happiness is good for the body but it is grief which develops the strength of the mind. -- Marcel ProustYou can probably find a quote a propos of anything in Proust, he ...
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May 1, 2008
- Do you keep index cards or sticky notes stuck to your monitor? I've been known to forget everything when writing so sometimes I have to remind myself of dental appointments and the like. But the other day I was cleaning out my desk and found two index cards that I lived by when I first started writing fiction in the long form. There is so much to remember, to keep in your head, it sometimes ...
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February 10, 2008
- I've not given 'the blog' much consideration untill now, but as I have this oportunity to begin one I will open this door of perception with an example of what I like to call OpOetic Writing. A combined term meant to define and to separate this (opinionated) work from "poetics" or "poetry" in the main. The form is for individual use or may be done in tandem with another ...
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January 9, 2008
- I Can’t Believe I Wrote the Whole Thing By Sam Horn, Author of Tongue Fu! and POP! Stand Out in Any Crowd The 6 Biggest Blocks That Keep Us From Finishing Our Book -- And How to Avoid and Overcome Them Do you:have several different writing projects going, all of them half-finished?start with great expectations, only to lose your enthusiasm along the way?know you should write more ...
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