I take great pride in seeing the students in my Seattle writing classes succeed. One of these students, Jeff Smoot, wrote the memoir, Hang Dog Days, which recently earned a runner up for the Banff Mountain Festival Book Award and …
Jeff Smoot Reads at The Writer’s Workshop Seattle Writing Classes Read More »
2020 Pacific Northwest Book Awards Shortlist Announced The Pacific Northwest Book Sellers association just announced its 2020 Book Awards Shortlist, selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska, a non-profit trade association that …
In her essay collection, Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor talks about writing as a habit of art. I discuss this approach in The Writer’s Workshop talk on The Writing Life, on Wednesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. in room 221 at …
In my Seattle writing classes, I have experts talk about how to write for magazines, among other topics. Alaska Airlines Magazine associate editor Andrew Waite talked to my summer Seattle writing class about how to write successfully for magazines. He …
How to Outline a Story or Book Outlining a story or book allows you to chart the emotional peaks and valleys of the story so that you’ll know where you’re heading when you sit down to write. As I …
In my Seattle writing classes, I invite experts to talk about their approach to writing and editing. I had the pleasure of having Alaska Airlines Magazine associate editor Andrew Waite talk to my spring Seattle writing class about how to …
I’m now working on the next issue of The Writer’s Workshop Review, the online literary magazine for The Writer’s Workshop. The stories have been accepted; now the editing begins, choosing the photos to run with the stories, writing the captions …
Pitching story ideas to magazines and newspapers is one of the essential skills I teach in my writing classes. Recently I had the pleasure of hosting Paulette Perhach, a Seattle-based freelance writer and author of Welcome to the Writer’s Life, …
In my Seattle writing classes, I teach how to write a dramatic scene, an especially effective way of organizing stories. In my Seattle writing classes, I explain how to use dramatic scenes to give life and movement to stories, whether …
THE WRITING LIFE WITH THE WRITER’S WORKSHOP In her essay collection, Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor talks about writing as a habit of art. I discuss this approach in The Writer’s Workshop talk on The Writing Life, on Wednesday, …
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
Ernest Hemingway
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a nam
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
