Anne Learns to Write
For someone who’s been writing for five decades, it’s weird that I just learned how.
For someone who’s been writing for five decades, it’s weird that I just learned how.
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?
From a male client working on a novel: I have a question on a sensitive topic and it’s a bit scary for me to ask. I’m thinking of using a boss of mine as a model for [Character X, an antagonist]. People get criticized for making women “shrill” or “too emotional” and I know this …
On the Editor Roundtable Podcast, where we analyze movies for story structure, the question of subtext comes up a lot. Subtext seems easier to detect in a movie than in writing because film gives us actors’ expressions, background visuals and sounds, camera techniques, music. In a novel all you’ve got is text. Words on the …
My book cover for Restraint began with a thousand crazy tasks, and ended here: Ninety percent of the saga—junk shop scavenging, spray painting, sewing, pinning, upholstering, dyeing, borrowing, eBaying and freaking out-—has been has been cropped or photoshopped out of the final cover. And yet everyone agrees that it’s all still there, under the surface. Even …
The turning point in my Story Grid story was right where it needed to be: at the Midpoint Shift, in the morning of Day 3 in Nashville. That’s when Shawn Coyne revealed his plan for disrupting the decrepit New York publishing model, and I realized that I was part of something way bigger than just …