Flow: Writing vs. Solitaire

Even if you haven’t read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, you’ve probably read something that refers to it, and you’ve most likely experienced a “flow” or “optimal experience”, even if it’s just doing crossword puzzles. Often writing is given as an example of a flow experience. Oh, really?

Reading as a Writer

Since my official topic here is learning about writing from what I reading, I found a lot to think about in the latest Writing Excuses about Reading Critically, not as a critic, though, but as a writer.

Tracks

I thought I would try an experiment. While I didn’t care for what I wrote in the flash fiction workshop at Boskone, I did feel inspired enough to try again. So here’s a picture I took this morning, after letting it sit in the back of my mind, here’s what came out when I started […]

My rewriting wresolutions

One of the up sides of going to Boskone is just hanging out with fellow writers. One of the down sides is repeatedly being confronted with my difficulties in letting go of the stories I’m working on. There’s the pen story, in which a merchant’s daughter discovers that the pen she borrowed is a lot […]

Can you exposit?

It may be an old nugget in the web scale of things, but the Writing Excuses about exposition is a really useful nugget. My one, incredibly silly quibble in the midst of hearing good advice like the three detail rule and reassurances that fantasy readers expect to be tossed into your world headfirst, was hearing […]

Re: Beginnings, Middles, & Ends

Beginnings, Middles, & Ends, by Nancy Kress is one of those books I keep coming back to. It’s so well organized: beginnings, middles, and ends crossed with plot, character, and revision. And it explicates one central idea, which gives the writer the reassuring feeling she is handing you an infinitely flexible tool that will help […]

This is how I write

So this morning, I was staring at the computer and thinking, Hey it’s time to write. But I didn’t want to, not yet, and I told myself I was doing pretty good to even be thinking about it on time. So I went back to staring at the computer. And then I thought, You know […]

Re: Modern Library Writer’s Workshop

For some reason, most of the writing books I like seem to be written by genre writers. Nancy Kress. Stephen King. Walter Mosley. Orson Scott Card. They still emphasize narrative. I just don’t buy the idea that modern literature has moved beyond narrative and we should be impressed with character studies and slice-of-life depiction and […]

Re: Save the Cat!

It’s funny that a recent comment mentions movies and TV as a source for your scifi and fantasy fix, as I am interested in screenplays. In fact, some of the more emphatic statements about storytelling are found in screenwriting books. For example, Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, which I first heard about on The […]

Beginnings are hard

I think I’m making a bit of headway with that beginning that’s giving me so much trouble, but I’ve had a couple of those days where you look at the screen in utter despair because it’s boring and no one will get past that first page and nothing you’ve done has fixed it and there’s […]