My dear friend, Arlene Mandell, asked a question the other day that I’ve been pondering. What happens to our scraps of writing? What can we do with our journal writing and our freewrites? I just read “The Secret Life of a Teenage Author” by Amy Zhang in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers. Zhang’s honesty and confession led me to want to learn more about her. Her blog, “A Story of a Dreamer,” is inspiring and delightful. The October 10 post begins, “If You Give an Author Some Chocolate …to encourage her to revise, she’ll eat it. She’ll eat it slowly because there is an art to eating chocolate bars. She’ll try to revise while holding the chocolate bar in one hand, but realize that she can’t revise without proper music. If you let an author look for proper music, she’ll decide that her normal revising playlist simply…
Tag: Gorgeous writing
Gorgeous Writing by Melanie Thorne
I love gorgeous writing. Melanie Thorne‘s novel, Hand Me Down is rich with gorgeous writing. People magazine calls it “Compelling.” From San Jose Mercury News: “Hand Me Down, which recalls the gritty power of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, is fiction with the ring of truth.” Here’s a sample of what we’re talking about: “As I watch the night sketch ghostly shapes in the darkness, a draft sweeps through the room, into my cramped chest, and plants a seed of ice deep inside.” “She’s warm and she holds me longer than Mom had in the rain, and I stand there frozen, squeezing my eyes tight against her shoulder. She smells like clean stream water and a hint of lavender and I inhale that freshness in the first deep breath I’ve taken in weeks.” If you ever have a chance to hear Melanie speak, or take a class from her…