Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 11

Rockin’ Robin, Tweet, Tweet. . .um. . . No Tweet: Or How I Had To Join The Quitterverse In Order To Write My Book & Now Have Lost The Thread

  By Robin Black   I loved the couple of years it took me to tweet approximately 8500 times. I loved the tweeting part, anyway. I discovered that, although yes, there are indeed creepy weirdos in the world, for the most part there are not. People are great. And people ...

The Three-Dimensional Self: Uncovering Personal Narratives

By Kim Triedman I turned 55 today. I’m not fishing for belated birthday wishes.  Trust me — I’d rather let it slip by unnoticed. I only mention it because, for me, those birthdays divisible by 5 always force some manner of reckoning or re-appraisal. So start here: I am a ...

Dress for Success, Write to Get Better

by Bethanne Patrick My eldest daughter recently graduated from college, and she has even more recently joined the workforce. I hope I may be forgiven, as her mother, for secretly thinking how adorable she looks each morning when she stumbles downstairs for coffee, clad in office-appropriate togs: cute flats, cardigans, ...

On Writing and Moral Sentiment

By Catherine Parnell Writers and students often ask how to marry the personal and the political in their work.  While I have no good answer, I did have an aha moment a few days ago that struck as I lifted a striped watermelon at the local market: if it’s heavy ...

Voices In My Head

By Mari Passananti If you type “why are all writers” into the Google search box, the search engine auto-fills the suggestions “crazy,” “depressed,” and “alcoholics.” Most of us who write for a living frequently field the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” In most polite company, the “you crazy ...

But I Digress

By Nichole Bernier You’re writing a tense scene, really in the thick of it: An aging actress is holding a handful of pills. She’s been offered the role of the star’s mother, rather than that of the star. She lifts glass of water toward her mascara-streaked face, pills cupped in her ...

Amazon, Publishers & the Sun & the Wind

By Randy Susan Meyers Long ago, the Wind and the Sun fought about who was the stronger. Suddenly they saw a traveller coming down the road, and the Sun said: “I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveler to take off his cloak ...

The Only Perfect Novel There Is

By Juliette Fay I just finished my latest novel, and it’s perfect. Not perfect perfect, of course. It’s honeymoon perfect. It’s sunny, flag-fluttering, best-wave day at the beach perfect. Which is to say, it can’t last. I finished the first draft early last month, and then spent a couple of ...

The Novelist as Ethnographer

by Christiane Alsop When I am not writing fiction I write ethnography. Sometimes I cannot tell the difference – which at first glance doesn’t seem to make sense. Ethnography, after all, is a collection of methods that social sciences use as tools in their quest to describe and understand the ...

“LIFE DRAWING” LAUNCH: Why I Love This Book

By Randy Susan Meyers Show don’t tell: This is the advice shoved down our writerly throats from the moment we tap on our computers— thus, I won’t begin by telling you that Robin Black is a brilliant author who puts a tuning fork to the soul of a marriage, that ...