writing tips
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There’s been a lot of bad news this summer. Drought, unrest, domestic violence, hacking the Cloud, hacking off heads… in the 21st century. We’d hoped we would be better by now. One of the most important things the arts can do is allow us into another person’s world. Of course, if you set out to…
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Sunday evening, I had the great pleasure of taking a workshop at Body Chance from Benedikt Negro, lead performer in Cirque du Soleil’s O for the past 11 years. Let that sink in a moment. 11 years, 10 shows a week and no injuries, thanks in part to the Alexander Technique. That’s something like 5,000 performances. He…
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In an ongoing conversation about men and women with my friend, Chuck, he remarked that men often fall on the idiot side of stupid where women are concerned, whether it’s about seeing what’s right in front of them, breaking old patterns or choosing destructive over healthy. Women have their own issues around bad judgment, such…
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Here’s the next installment from Lee Stoops. Been a crazy week, so apologies for the delay in posting! Building the Case for Changing the Way We Think We need to make sense of our perceptions. Imagination is the core of our human experience. It’s how we build memories and process. I’m not talking about imagination…
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by guest blogger Lee Stoops: In our generation of images and scenes, we tend to recreate the things that have strongly affected us. I need to note something about cliché here. Something is labeled cliché when it affects (or has affected) a lot of people. The problem with cliché, and why it doesn’t work for…
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Want to stand out with your writing? Or in general? Remove hyperbole from your writing and, for that matter, your speech. Have you noticed that people now seem to be incapable of speaking without it? We’ve become gushers of adjectives, adverbs, and expletives. A touch of hyperbole can strengthen a scene, but if it’s not…
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Part of the writing life is managing your moods. You’ve heard that if you wait for inspiration to strike in order to write, well…. Yeah, that novel doesn’t write itself. Do you catch yourself indulging in any of these three behaviors? They’re all part of the same thing with different time references: Self pity –…
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Several times this past year, I had people ask how they could help me with my books. The first question I asked was whether they’d bought any of them. No. Well, there’s a start! You want to help an author, buy their books. Forget all the fancy posts on book marketing…
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Why do you write about what you write about? What images or feelings stay with you after reading a story or watching a film? What genres resonates the most with you? Horror? Thriller? The life of the mind or the heart? Mystery? Romance? What feelings or images stick with you? Do you know why? What…
Diane Sherlock 
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