I’ve listened to the Writing Excuses podcast for years. In the first nine seasons they would sometimes give writing prompts. In season ten they started giving homework at the end of each episode. I’ve gone back to year ten and am going through the homework. Though the assignments are most annoying, they’re even more beneficial. […]
We discussed ways to connect our blog with our book, which works well for memoir and nonfiction but not so much for fiction. While the vision is clear to blogging a memoir or nonfiction work, it’s murky when it comes to fiction. With fiction, we can’t simply blog excerpts from our book because we will […]
Though using a pattern to inform our books’ structure has merit, it may lead us to a troublesome end There are multiple guides we can follow to properly structure the books we write. Perhaps the most common is the three-act structure, but there are many others as well. There’s enough to make me dizzy, so […]
What writers can learn from the life and career of Carrie Fisher On December 26, 2016, my wife and I went to see the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The next morning I learned that Carrie Fisher had died. Like most people, I knew her for her iconic performance as Princess Leia in […]
To progress as an author requires hard work and diligent focus I’ve been writing my entire adult life. In the early years, my primary goal was to write faster, but for the past decade or so, my focus was on writing better. As I attended to learning the craft of writing, my writing has steadily […]
Each week I write five blog posts. Each month I write one magazine article, three newsletter articles, two more blog posts, and usually one press release. That’s a lot of writing, requiring a lot of ideas. Yet I never have writer’s block. Why is that? Because I’ve cultivated a method to discover and develop content […]
I’m a movie buff, enjoying most genres and all eras, including silent movies and especially Buster Keaton films. One of them, Our Hospitality, set in 1830 Appalachia is a classic tale of boy meets girl, who only finds out too late that her family is set on killing his. Will love prevail or will their […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD It’s been said Gene Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek TV show as “a western in outer space.” I can appreciate the simplicity of that statement, but think it’s a bit off the mark. However, that would’ve been perfect for the TV show Firefly. Firefly truly was a western in […]
There are a lot of movies about writing and even more when you consider movies that have writers as characters. Here’s my initial list:
Last week I shared my foray into writing movie reviews. It wasn’t long before I began penning book reviews as well. However, unlike my short-lived tenure writing movie reviews, book reviewing is a practice that has continued. So far I’ve written 53 (it takes longer to read a book, so the numbers accumulate slower.) The […]