I’ve been frustrated with myself these past few weeks. You see, my dream is to write full time, and, temporarily, I have the opportunity to live that dream. I’m currently back in the states while my husband is finishing up his teaching certification. Unless things get really tight, we’ve agreed that I’ll use these few…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about subtlety in writing, both in characterization and on the small-scale prose level, and why it is so affecting. My husband and I have made a project of watching all of the AFI top 100 movies. A few nights ago we watched The Searchers. I’d seen it once before,…
Our characters are ever facing decisions. It is the choices they make that map the course of our novels. (Books that fail to create character driven stories generally feel like a long string of “and then this happened”s. Not ideal.) Sometimes the correct choice is clear cut—one option is bad, the other good. These scenarios…
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… I am a Scrivener fangirl. My love of this beautiful piece of software is, perhaps, slightly extreme. For me, it is more than just the wonderful tool that helped me to write, edit, and format my novel. It is, in a lot of ways, the…
“When characters are really alive, before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action.” ~ Luigi Pirandello I made one great mistake in the writing of my first novel (and, of course, it was fixable and I learned from it so I suppose it wasn’t that great). I let my characters…
As of this past week, I’ve been living in South Korea for one year. In light of my Koreaversary, I’ve been thinking about the impact living abroad has had on me as a writer. There is such a beautiful symbiosis between writing and travel. At its most basic, storytelling consists of two parts: 1.) Introduce…
It’s a wonderful feeling—completing that first draft of your very first novel. If you’re like me, you did a dorky happy dance, facebooked about it, then went out for celebratory drinks. But as that euphoria fades, the prospect of editing begins to rear its daunting head. Having never completed a novel before, I had no…
