Anne Learns to Write
For someone who’s been writing for five decades, it’s weird that I just learned how.
Masterwork Experiment
The Slow Grind of a First Draft
Let me tell you about first drafts. Well, my first drafts. Or at least this particular first draft. It’s a mess. It feels like a hopeless mess.
How’s that Brokeback Mountain ripoff coming, anyway?
I examine the internal roadblocks to completing my draft of the Brokeback Mountain inspired story, and try to get going again.
Preparing for Episode 10
The Masterwork Experiment podcast concludes with today’s recording. Here’s what I’ve learned.
Masterwork Experiment 3: Defining the Characters
In this episode Shawn and I spend some talking about the two characters I’ve already begun to define for Danebury Hill: Matthew the footman and Josiah the groom. I argued for giving my characters more of a happy ending, partly because I want to solve the puzzle of how two servant class men in the …
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Masterwork Experiment Episode 2
In this episode, I ace the “Beginning Hook, Middle Build, Ending Payoff” summary of Brokeback Mountain, though not without a few tears in my voice, because damn, that story is sad. There’s a huge temptation, in working with someone as accomplished as Shawn Coyne, to play the Good Student and try to get an A …
Danebury Hill: Getting Started
In Episode 1 of The Masterwork Experiment, Shawn Coyne and I discussed the parameters of the experiment. I’m supposed to break Annie Proulx’s 10,500 word long-short story into its component scenes, and later into its beats. Beats are the sub-parts of scenes. I don’t understand them yet, but Shawn has described them as “units of …
Podcasting with Shawn Coyne
Ten weeks writing a novella in public with Shawn Coyne as my editor…and a whole series of very strict constraints. What could go wrong?