Allen Learst's Blog

Black bear and ideas for writing....

I've been working on my novel called BONEFISH for about 10 years. The idea came to me in a kind of frenzy and I wrote a rough draft in about 15 weeks. And I do mean rough, but I kept at it because I thought there was a story there, I just had to find it. This particular piece of writing is now 71,000 words and lately it has been growing, mostly because I've decided (again) to take it out of first person and put it into third person, which I think works better. It gives me more latitude to co...

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account) by Charles Dickens

When you're learning how to write, and you want to write, one of the best activities you can think of is to keep a journal. I'm not talking about a diary, I'm talking about writing anything that pops into your mind. The last journal entry I made was this: How come death is never a she? I could be wrong about that. It's entirely possible somone's referred to death with a feminine pronoun, I just can't think of one off the top of my head. No matter.

I've always lamented the fact I didn't keep a...

All My Friends are Dying

Or so it seems. . . Here's the truth. I'm aging and so are my contemporaries, which I'm reminded every time I open Facebook. My mind is full of memories--many of which often elude me, often fade in and out. It's all part of the process I'm told. The short term doesn't work as well, but the long term keeps on giving, and sometimes in remarkable detail. There have been countless times I've said to myself: "I'll never forget this moment." But I do and I have. I like to remind my students that I...

The Raft of My Imagination

At age twelve or thirteen I read Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Since I was an only child, I spent a great deal of time alone and in my imagination. I didn’t have any way of knowing that later in life I’d want to be a writer, but I did begin to understand the power of storytelling. I loved that book so much I read passages of it over and over because I read it as a boy’s adventure story. I repeated the stories often to my friends, mostly arguing how great it would be to go down...

March 30th, 2013

Beginning writers frequently wonder what they might write about and usually write about subjects with which they have very little experience. Mostly, I think, this attitude seems to be coming from a lack of understanding about their own experiences. Often, if you ask a student about his or her life, the response is frequently: "My Life is boring." Anyone who writes, of course, knows this is far from the truth. It seems to me that everyone's life is rich with experience, where you grew up, ho...

February 12th, 2013

Most people give me a strange look when I tell them I worked on “Point Man” for eight years. It was the story that wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t leave me alone because I knew it was a story I wanted to tell, but I didn’t know how; I didn’t understand the craft of fiction well enough to give my characters life, to make them believable. “Point Man” began as a clichéd war account. It changed point of view several times before I settled on third person limited omniscience. I discovered the story’s...

Paranoia, they'll destroy ya...

Paranoia, they’ll destroy ya… ~Kinks

A note came to me the other day from an old friend in Detroit and I totally misread the comment that was intended to compliment Dancing at the Gold Monkey; instead, I went on the defensive, thinking that what my friend meant was that there was a direct correlation with real events. I could not have been further from the truth.
Got your call late last night so didn't call back. Your message sounded strange. I re-read your email this morning and wanted t...

Paranoia, they'll destroy ya...

Paranoia, they’ll destroy ya… ~Kinks

A note came to me the other day from an old friend in Detroit and I totally misread the comment that was intended to compliment Dancing at the Gold Monkey; instead, I went on the defensive, thinking that what my friend meant was that there was a direct correlation with real events. I could not have been further from the truth.
Got your call late last night so didn't call back. Your message sounded strange. I re-read your email this morning and wanted t...

Re-vision Means to Re-see

When I was in the writing program at Oklahoma State University, some fellow students I encountered refused to re-write. Baffled by their resistance, I began to doubt what I was working on. Was I paying too much attention to some of the same stories that were part of an earlier MA thesis? Was this a kind of double-dipping or cheating? Was my imagination so stunted that I couldn't come up with new material? Was I subconsciously trying to avoid writing or more work? These questions weighed heav...

Entering Contests

In this first blog entry, I just want to note how important it is to enter contests. The rationale for entering contests is simple. They create recognition, which we writers need (even if we don't like it) to get our names out there. You can never tell who will see your work and respond to it. I entered an essay called "The Blood of Children" in Water~Stone, a journal published at Hamline University. Though I did not win the competition for best essay, people began to notice my work. From th...