I can barely keep up with Twitter and Facebook, so when I accepted a friend's invitation to join Goodreads--a social media network dedicated to books--I did so with reluctance. For months I allowed my account to remain idle. Then I searched Audible for a good audiobook to download for the long drive to Montpelier, Vermont, …
Month: August 2013
Guest Post: How Properly Structured Beginnings and Endings Hold Your Book Together
The indomitable K.M. Weiland is at it again with a new writing craft book titled Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story. We have on occasion posted on each other's blogs and we like to retweet each other. Today I'm providing a new guest post from her that provides a bit of …
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4 Steps To Slashing that Manuscript in Revision
My mission: Reduce a 384-page first-draft memoir manuscript to 300 pages. Why? Because I know a tighter book will be a more pleasurable read, and because I know it will be easier to sell a shorter book to a publisher than a longer one. I've spent the last two months revising the memoir I wrote …
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The Role of Structure in Creative Free Thinking
Creativity can closely resemble chaos, as it did for me last week when I watched thirty 5th-graders whirling around a classroom with cardboard, duct tape, motors, gears, string and safety scissors. I was witnessing problem solving in action, solutions borne of a broad liberty in thought framed by a specific challenge needing to be addressed. …
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How Does it Feel to Have Earned an MFA?
"How does it feel to have earned an MFA?" It's a question I have heard frequently from well-meaning people, and I have had no answer. It has been exactly one month since I received my diploma in front of my wife, daughter and son in the grand chapel of College Hall at the Vermont College …
The Artist's Road 