SUMMARY SCENE OPENINGS – WRITING PROCEDURE COPYRIGHT THE WRITER’S WORKSHOP Scenic writing is the basis for some of the most moving, satisfying, sophisticated works of literature, something I teach in all my writing classes. It is especially effective in bringing …
Category: Writing Techniques
The Perfect Pitch: Story Ideas in Writing Classes
THE PERFECT PITCH: STORY IDEAS IN WRITING CLASSES Narrative writers organize their books and shorter pieces in terms of a story or chronology, probably the oldest and most compelling way of relating information. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. …
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The Writing Life: Seattle 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 …
Take a Journey with a Traveler’s Tale
If you love to travel like I do, you’ve probably found the last six months a challenging time. After canceling my Travel Writing class in Spain and an assignment to ski in Austria, I have hunkered down at home to …
Summer Reads for Tumultuous Times from The Writer’s Workshop
In these tumultuous times, it seems hard to imagine how things can return to normal. How can we get through Covid, police brutality, protests, riots, high unemployment and general malaise? One of the best ways to find hope in dark …
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Book Promotion During a Pandemic
Book Promotion During a Pandemic Promoting a book is challenging enough in normal times. Doing this during a pandemic makes it even more problematic. Nevertheless, it can be done successfully, according to Molly Woolbright, the publicist at Sasquatch Books, …
Best Books to Read During Covid Pandemic
If there’s any silver lining to this Covid 19 scourge, it may be that people now have time to read and write. Some people are writing about how their lives have changed. Others are writing about anything but Covid, relishing …
How to Submit Stories to Literary Magazines
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 Norris’ Dakota grew out of shorter stories published …
How To Write a Page Turner
Scenic writing animates some of the most moving, satisfying, sophisticated works of literature as I teach in my Seattle writing classes and other writing classes. It quickly brings readers into the story because it helps create a world, a world …
New Issue of The Writer’s Workshop Review
I’m now working on the new issue of The Writer’s W orkshop Review. Stay tuned!
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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 -
“One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.”
Patricia Marx -
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 -
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver -
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
Ray Bradbury
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The Writer's Workshop, an on-campus and online program offering writing
classes in Seattle, online and travel writing classes.