They say it’s best to embrace your past, learn from it, and move on to live your best life.
So what better way to embrace your cringe-worthy past than by having a bunch of strangers write haiku poems about it?
Month: December 2018
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been working with some awesome viewers to put together a short story/poem anthology based around the theme of: “A Post-Apocalyptic Christmas.”
And now, it’s here!
Are you ready to dig into eight stories that span the spectrum of cute to grimdark, all speculating what the season looks like after the end of the world?
Church bells are ringing. Elves are singing. Donkeys are braying for joy.
Shrek and Santa Claus are getting married!
…there’s only one problem: they can’t use the letter “E” to tell their story.
Sometimes when you’re writing a story, your characters can all seem to blend and congeal together. Their opinions, reactions, and personality start to become indistinguishable from each other.
But don’t let that happen! Different characters with different perspectives and attitudes are exactly what make stories great.
If you want to make sure that your characters are coming through strong, clear, and different from each other, then there’s an easy way to test it out: write a conversation between them using dialogue only.
Writing fantasy, especially fantasy that takes place in a different world, is extremely difficult. You have to walk the fine line between giving the reader enough detail to see the world, but not so much that you overwhelm them.
Thankfully there are lots of authors who have already done this extremely well, whose works we can look at! And one such example is A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge.
Does your story feel detached or distant? Are readers just not connecting with what you’ve written in the way you want them to?
Then you may have a problem with passive voice!
Have you ever written something and cried your eyes out, only to share it with someone else and they don’t have the same reaction?
What did you do wrong? Why didn’t they have the same emotional response that you did?
Maybe your sad story was missing one of the four crucial steps to make your reader cry!
One year ago on December 11, 2017 I decided to start a writing stream. Living in the middle of nowhere Japan, it was impossible to find other English writers, and I missed the groups that I had in Boston.
Thankfully I remembered that the Internet is a thing that exists.
And now we are a writing force to be reckoned with! To celebrate how awesome everyone is for helping to make our stream the best place to be three times a week, we had a celebration of writing games, announcements, and more.
Sometimes when you finish a first draft, or even when you’re just partway through a draft, you might sit back and realize that your story makes no sense.
It can be a terrible feeling. This story that you’ve poured months or years of your life into needs to be fixed, but you don’t know how to do it.
One good way to tackle that problem is by getting some practice beforehand fixing stories in books and movies that you don’t like.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has ended, and there are a lot of people out there with finished first drafts of books.
First off, congratulations! Writing is a long, arduous process, and finishing the first draft is an important first step. But now you might be wondering, what do I do next?
Unfortunately, it’s time for the scariest thing imaginable: showing your work to other people.