My past two weeks.
Posts
My writing.
Hi all, After a number of posts not about me, I thought it was time to shout out to the world about what I have been up to with my writing. New Article on Divine I have a new article up on the Divine website . This one is for all those people who love to cover footpaths with their out of control gardens, or think it is a great place to park their car, too bad for pedestrians who use wheelchairs or can’t see. I have started researching another article and the editor of Divine has suggested a further article I have agreed to write. Google+ I mentioned in a previous post that changes Facebook had made were making it harder to plug my blog and Divine writing. I said I was going to explore other avenues of social networking. Well, I am now using Google+ more often than Facebook. I particularly like the communities setup on Google+ and I have joined a number of very active and highly informative writing and speculative fiction groups. I have also starte...
To Plot or Abandon.
Creative Writing: Learning from the Masters (Part Two) If you missed my last post, I have been reading an ibook called Creative Writing: Learning from the Masters. The masters are John Irving, Carol Joyce Oates, Ernest J Gaines, Amy Tan, Norman Mailer and Carol Shields. Plotting a novel. There are supposedly two types of writers: those who write an outline of the novel before they start writing it, and those who just start writing and see where the story takes them. John Irving is an extreme example of the first. He spends months writing a detailed plan of a novel so when he finally gets around to writing it he can concentrate on the words and language and not have to worry about what happens next. What really intrigued me about Irving is that he writes these outlines backwards. He starts with the final line of the book and then works out how the story got to that final line. This immediately had me rushing to my bookshelves and retrieving The World Accor...
Creative Writing: Learning From the Masters.
I am about halfway through the ibook, Creative Writing: Learning from the Masters. The masters are Norman Mailer, Amy Tan, Earnest J Gaines, John Irving, Carol Shields, and Joyce Carol Oates. I have read a couple of John Irving’s novels ( The World According To Garp and Hotel New Hampshire ) and seen at least three films adapted from his novels (the previous two plus The Cider House Rules ). I have read one Norman Mailer novel ( Tough Guys Don’t Dance ) and seen the film that he directed of that novel. I have read The Best American Short Stories 1999 edited by Amy Tan (I loved her foreword where she said that a lot of the stories, which had all been previously published, she considered for the collection left her wondering what they hell they were about. So I am not the only one who is not afraid to admit they didn’t get a story.) They all Started Young. All the masters started writing when they were young. And they all had success when they were ...