Five Quite Recent Provocations Langdon gasped. If he’d deciphered the symbols correctly, Jesus had married Joan of Arc at Stonehenge! If not, it was a recipe for meatloaf. — Dan Vinci’s Nunferno (@Nunferno) May 24, 2013 Provocation One: Man Booker Irrational? When the American novelist Lydia Davis was given the £60,000 Man Booker International this [...]

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My writing workshop students and I were having a lively discussion recently about the pros and cons of using real life in our work. Half of the class is trying to figure out if they want to tell their stories via memoir or novel. One woman had turned in pages for critique about her relationship [...]

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Tomorrow, I go back to full-time employment. I got a new job I’m very psyched about. I’m also teaching a writing workshop on Saturdays for eight weeks. So I’ll be busy, and I need to write. I’m a little concerned about getting back in the habit of using my time wisely (no more Real Housewives [...]

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What’s this? Me, the arch-planner, admitting that my characters sometimes have a will of their own? I’ve always dismissed that idea as nonsense. Characters come from the mind of the writer, where else? The writer invents them, so they dance to her tune. She can make them do and think and say what she wants [...]

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I got an e-reader from Santa. The first book I read on it was Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott. At one point she talks about giving advice to someone to act as if they had a belief in a higher power. That phrase “act as if” is big in 12 Step circles. Not feeling [...]

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I’m not keen on New Year’s resolutions. It’s too easy for us to end up in a mire of guilt, weighed down by our failure to meet our own expectations. On the other hand, defined goals can help those of us who might otherwise become TV watching, junk food eating couch potatoes, with nothing more [...]

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  I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say. – Marshall McLuhan   I’ve been putting together some thoughts recently on our collective readership. Not us when we read. Not our delegation here of Unboxed Writers. And not even the wider community of writers, local and offshore, national and intergalactic, the diaspora-digital, and where it [...]

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Kath here. Please welcome Julie Hedlund to Writer Unboxed today. Julie submitted one of the winning pitches via the Writer Unboxed Facebook page, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Julie’s first book, A TROOP IS A GROUP OF MONKEYS, will be released as an interactive storybook app for the iPad in January 2013 by Little Bahalia Publishing. [...]

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I had a concept in mind that had been nagging away at me for months, demanding to be crafted into a story. Two concepts, in fact, one about a cat and one about two dogs. Both seemed ideal for inclusion in my short fiction collection, Prickle Moon. I made numerous attempts to write these stories, [...]

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A couple of days ago I caught myself trying to do five things at once: bake scones for a family visit (English scones, the kind you eat with jam) complete the fancy beading on a princess outfit for a teddy bear sweep the floor, put away the washing, quickly toddler-proof my living area write my [...]

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Kath here. We are very excited to welcome Martha Alderson, aka the Plot Whisperer, to Writer Unboxed today. Martha is the author of the new plot workbook: The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories – a companion workbook to The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master. The [...]

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This week I judged about 25 entries for a fiction-writing contest at an upcoming writers’ conference at which I’m also doing a workshop. My task was to name first-place and second-place choices. I found 2 that I could honestly say deserved a “win.” Now, each of these 25 or so writers did the best they [...]

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