You can't be a writer unless you're willing to hack it to bits and mow down those darlings as they run for cover. Okay, maybe that's a bit melodramatic, but writing is an ugly business even if you never resort to using blood instead of ink. Editing exhausts me. Not in the way toiling away …
Continue reading Edit or Die Trying (or is it edit ’til you die?)
There's nothing romantic about money. Starving artists in garretts are not cooler or more authentic than artists in air conditioned studios. And so this month when I am without any classes and therefore without a paycheck for three weeks, I am with a wonderful amount of time with which to write and create--hours at a …
Continue reading money makes the world go ’round & the pen move with more ease
I've never been someone searching for what to do with my life. I've never had a radical transformation from one religion to another, one political belief to another, one way of living to another. I declared my college major at seventeen and never considered changing it. Plenty of my friends wonder what they should be …
One reason to stay up late writing is that when I try to go to bed at a civilized hour, my characters won't let me sleep anyway--like they're jostling in my brain with their thoughts and things they need to say and do. It's mental. At one point I realized that I couldn't tell if …
Most of the time my writing is dreadful, but once in a while it works so well I have to do a little dance in my closet and say, yes, Yes, YES! What fun to capture a scene so filled with tension--of many kinds--that it vibrates off the page. Can I say that about my …
My son's contribution to art everyday--which he really wants to see on the computer!
Lots of friends have told me that my husband and I have to watch the movie Sideways because it is about wine and my husband is in the wine business. What no one, not one of my friends, told me was that the main character is a writer. As far as I'm concerned, this is …
Keeping a plot in order is no easy task. Not for me anyway. So I need to make notes to remind myself of things--like, how long should it take Paul to decide to ask Valerie to marry him? Gotta have something go wrong, of course--what could it be? Someone from somebody's past is the most …
This is obvious, but it only recently struck me how challenging it will be for me to keep up lakebelle.blogspot.com simply because it happens in real time. That's REAL TIME. What on earth will I do when blog meets novel? How will there be plot? I must be out of my head. For the next …
I recently read an interview with a published author who said that a person is either born with talent or they're not--that you can't teach good writing. I practically decided never to read anything by this person ever again. Who do you know who sits there are says, "Oh, I'm a writer because I was …
