Hello, Story Circle Network friends. It’s been a while. Life has indeed gotten in the way the last few months, so please forgive my absence here. The first week of June, on the fourth day of a beach vacation in Fort Morgan, Alabama, my husband and I walked down to the beach after dinner to […]
Tough Story Love—How to Receive It
The previous post, “Tough Story Love—How to Give It,” proposed some strategies for offering substantive, helpful feedback on someone else’s written work. Suppose it’s your turn to receive your readers’ comments. Nervous? Right! But most workshop leaders set the tone and establish guidelines for feedback, so it’s a pretty safe place to be. You can […]
Tough Story Love: How to Give It
How do we offer honest, valuable feedback to someone else’s precious, creative work? How do we respond to another person’s writing without a) simply patting the writer on the back and praising the piece, or b) going so negative that the writer wants to rip the story up and never write again? One way is through […]
Character Misbehavior
What do you do with someone who won’t behave? This person is secretive, aloof, and moody. She’s keeping me up nights and interfering with my novel in progress. She’s the character who “vants to be alone!” Her name is Robin. She’s a twin. An accomplished photographer. She has dark hair and green eyes, she’s twenty […]
Open the Doors. Walk Right In!
In the last post, we talked about the importance of ridding a story of whatever isn’t absolutely necessary and/or doesn’t advance the story. This excess can be anything from losing a line of description to cutting out a character. Or a scene. In the case of novels, entire chapters. But once we’ve reduced a story […]
Story Surgery
Do you ever give up on a story? I often do. I seldom put one in the trash—that feels too final—but filing a story away feels like failure, which I hate. So I try again. I recently returned to a story that had given me fits. Something wasn’t working, but I couldn’t figure out what […]