Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 6

On Setting

By Kathy Crowley A few weeks ago I signed up for a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). This could be seen as the desperate impulse of a middle-aged person to keep pace with The New. On the other hand, this class is part of a series put together by the ...

How Writing Screenplays Helps You Write Better Dialogue

By Dell Smith So, you’re a pretty good writer. You’ve got swell feedback from your writing instructors and your peer critique group. Your plots are airtight, the structures of your stories are built with the care and precision of a civil engineer, your themes carry built-in platforms that agents and ...

Freeing the Rabbit: On Reading and Empathy

By Nichole Bernier The other day my six-year-old ran in the house screaming: “A RABBIT IS STUCK IN THE SOCCER NET!” When I went outside the poor thing was writhing frantic, the webbing wrapped double around its neck. The line was so tight it seemed impossible for it to be ...

Friday Faves: Goodwilly Hunting, Rambo Ruth & the Pinkbits of Doom

By Chris Abouzeid In a week full of Ebola, ISIS, and yet more videos of police officers demonstrating their right to beat, kick, taser and shoot anyone they don’t like, it’s hard to imagine there could be anything else to talk about. And yet the Internet—buoyed by its time-honored creed ...

What My Mother Gave Me: The Importance of Place

By Kim Triedman My mother gave me a wedge of her own childhood, perfect as pie. It was not something she could hold out in her hand for me to receive. It was not even one thing, although if I were to somehow distill it down to its essence it ...

Launch Rules

By E.B. Moore My launch is in less than 24 hours. What, what, what, to wear? A battleship gets to wear gray no questions asked. As a kid I may have felt like a battleship when confronting my closet as I chose the proper thing for a party my mother ...

From the Archives: When the Spirit Moves You

by Bethanne Patrick A few years back, a creative coach and writer named Bindu Wiles hosted an online writing-and-yoga challenge–30 minutes of yoga per day combined with 750 words of writing per day. I’m no yogini, but when Wiles said that those 30 minutes could be spent entirely in “corpse pose” (savasana), ...

Write On Through To The Other Side: When Your Character’s Diagnosis Becomes Your Own

By Natalie Serber   I clearly remember the day I gave my character, Mona Brown, her breast cancer diagnosis. I’d been writing a novel about Mona and her family, a husband and twin daughters, who moved from Portland to the rural community of Boring, Oregon in the hopes that they ...

Brush is to Canvas as Keyboard is to Computer Screen

    by Charles Garabedian A blank computer screen A blank canvas Both are calling me on a rainy Saturday morning in September as I sit at my desk with a cup of steaming French Roast coffee, freshly brewed. The sun hasn’t risen yet; it’s too early. My mind is beginning ...

20 Fiction Writing Renovations in Super-Short, Simplified Format

By Randy Susan Meyers During my (self-guided, self-nagged) courses in my ‘Homemade MFA’ I did many things: I read stacks of books, I read multiple favorite novels with an analytical eye, I participated in multiple writer’s groups and revised, revised, and then revised some more. And, I wrote ‘papers’ for ...