I’m now working on the new issue of The Writer’s W orkshop Review. Stay tuned!
Category: Food and Wine Writing Classes
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 …
How To Write for Magazines
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
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 …
Break into Freelance Magazine Writing
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 …
The Art of the Pitch For Freelance Writers
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, …
Social Media and Book Promotion
In my Seattle writing classes, I teach students the full range of narrative writing techniques as well as how to get published, including social media and book promotion. Now, obviously you have to write at a high level to get …
How to Create Strong Characters in Writing Classes
In my writing classes, I emphasize the need to bring people to life on the page. Strong characters are the heart and soul of every great story, whether fiction or nonfiction. To make your story compelling, you have to ensure …
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Seattle Writing Classes on How to Submit to Literary Magazines
In my Seattle writing classes, I emphasize that literary magazines occupy an important niche in the publishing world. They publish longer, more artistic stories that would make a tough sell in a commercial magazine. Many bestselling memoirs such as Kathleen …
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How to Make the Perfect Pitch
Pitching story ideas is a critical skill for every freelance writer. Virginia Smyth, the executive editor of Seattle Magazine, recently spoke to my Seattle writing classes about how to make the perfect pitch. “One of the most important questions in …
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And as imagination bodies forth
William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
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 -
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 -
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O’Connor
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. Naipaul
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