Writer Unboxed

Last week, Eric over at Quantam wondered if the use of the dialogue tag “said” was dead. The example he chose was Isaac Asimov’s NAKED SUN. Asimov basically wrote the book without any dialogue tags at all. Eric noted that they weren’t missed.
Most how-to books on writing fiction will tell writers that they need to […]

One of the reasons I love talking about screenplays is that the story must be tight in a movie–characters and plot must be developed in ~2 hours–and so screenplays can yield easily highlighted lessons for the writer. As it turns out, I did take my kiddos to see Disney’s newest baby, Eight Below, this weekend. […]

Recently, we had the honor of interviewing Audrey Niffenegger, author of the mega-best-seller The Time Traveler’s Wife, about career and craft. Audrey is also an artist and professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. If you’ve never read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and […]

Surfing the best of the writer’s blogs so you don’t have to.
This week we welcome some new blogs to our blogroll: Beatrice, Conversations with Famous Writers, and Buzzgirl. The latter is another insider blog, so hopefully Buzzgirl will dish on some useful goodies.
A.C. Crispin provides some useful material for combating writer abuse….over at Flogging, […]

Ignoring our emotions in the real world can literally cost us our lives; consider the most significant benefits of fear (escaping a house fire), despair (bringing help from others) and anger (the flight or fight response). Just as emotions are critical in real life, they are critical for the “life” of your story. A book […]

I’m from California, so for those who don’t know or care, this past Sunday was High Holy Day. Yes. The Oscars, and I’m not talking about hotdogs.
I don’t watch the Oscar award show itself (that would be crazy!) but I read about it obsessively the following day. Who wore what, why some films have mojo, […]

A little yahoo: One of my poems was published at The Angry Poet - here -on Friday.
I like reading poetry, and I love writing it. For me, poetry is the quick fix I most rely on to keep my creative juices churning when I’m otherwise buried in nonfiction work or spinning my wheels with my […]

Surfing the best of the writer blogs so you don’t have to…
Da Vinci Code plagiarism suit is keeping the writer blogs hopping. Booksquare, All Kinds of Books, Salon (free subscription required), Grumpy Old Bookman, Galley Cat.
Melly reminds us of Elmore Leonard’s rules for fiction writing. Note to self: no more use of “suddenly”….in more Elmore […]

I’d been thinking about Silence of the Lambs just the other day, so when I stumbled across it the other night while channel surfing, I set the remote down. SotL won five Oscars, including one for best adapted screenplay, so obviously the entire team did a lot of things right. But what I find most […]