“Readers seek the experience of the world through character emotion and consciousness. What we remember about books and movies is the way they made us feel/experience, which is why we crave another story-hit, more, more, more.” — Juneta Key, “A Look at World Building and the Reader Experience” Juneta elaborates: Use your character’s emotional attachment to places, things, and feeling of home–longing, or contentment, or discontentment. World building is an external and internal journey with the character. World building includes using all the senses, to create atmosphere, texture, and attachment: Sight, Smell, Touch, Hearing, Taste, and 6th sense. STORY EXAMPLE: Anne of Green Gables L. M. Montgomery uses the senses and emotions in such a way that her world is a character in itself. Read the free Project Gutenberg ebook. Chapter 1: First paragraph: “MRS. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with…
Category: Just Write
Don’t Rush It
“Don’t Rush It” by Morgan Baker I don’t like being late – to classes I teach or the airport to catch a plane. My anxiety meter goes haywire if I haven’t given myself the time to organize before school or when I’m packing to go away. Will I need my swimsuit? What about those shoes? I allow extra time wherever I go, which means I’m usually early. My stepfather once told my daughter as he drove her to a summer job, “You’re on time if you’re ten minutes early.” I’ve taken that to heart. When my daughter and I went to a wedding in Montana a few years ago, we were excited about the event, and to see the big sky landscape we had heard so much about. I didn’t want to feel rushed or anxious, so I allowed for plenty of extra time to get through security and find our gate….
Push Past The Fluff
When you are freewriting and there is more time to write, but you feel ready to stop . . . try to keep going. Push the limits. Push past the urge to go no farther. After the fluff is written, deeper writing can happen. Perhaps a doorway to intuitive writing will open. One of the benefits of writing fine details when freewriting, besides exploration and discovering forgotten items, is that details are what make stories interesting and make them come alive. I Feel StatementsThe reason for “I feel” statements in freewrites is that this is a way to learn and access your emotions about what happened. This is what personal essay or memoir writing is all about. The facts are interesting, but what the reader wants to know is: ~ What the narrator gained ~ The narrator’s emotions ~ What lesson was learned ~ The epiphany or the “aha” moment…
Write About Your Loss
Write About Your Loss By Ninette Hartley “Well, he has a broken leg but that’s the least of his problems. He has suffered some trauma to his head. In this country we . . . how can I put it? . . . we would say he is brain dead.” On the 13th of January 2011 my twenty-seven-year-old son Thomas was rushed to intensive care in Porto, having fallen through a skylight whilst searching for somewhere to paint graffiti. I received a phone call from a doctor in the hospital, and when I asked her how bad it was she explained his injuries to me. Her English was good, but I couldn’t quite take it in. His step-father and I had to get from Italy (where we lived at the time) to Portugal as quickly as we could. The hospital was waiting impatiently for me, his next of kin, to…
Layering
Layering: The goal of layering in writing is to take unrelated elements and bring them together in a single piece of writing. “Layering means that we’re weaving in different elements of our story, characters, writing craft, etc. Some writers even start with just one element—such as writing their whole story just as dialogue—and then layer in everything else once they have the shape of the story.” — Jami Gold Ideas to add layering in your writing. Start with lists: List #1: Some facts about yourself or your fictional character List#2: Favorite food or music List #3: Favorite movies or TV shows List #4: Philosophical sayings List #5: A type of clothing or furniture Freewrite: #1: Using a word or phrase from each of the lists, spend a few minutes creating a piece of writing. Freewrite #2, Layering: Add an outside event as a metaphor to echo the theme of your freewrite….
Star 82 Review
Star 82 Review is an independent art and literature, online and print magazine that highlights words and images in gemlike forms. Each issue includes a combination of flash fiction, creative nonfiction, erasure texts, narrative art, word+image, collage poems, and poetic storytelling featuring subtle humor, humility and humanity, the strange and the familiar, and hope. Star 82 is the code needed to unblock one’s phone number. Tell us who you are. Someone will answer. Submission Guidelines Star 82 Review was founded in 2012 by Alisa Golden, then a senior adjunct professor in the Printmaking Program at California College of the Arts, later, teaching letterpress in the MFA Writing Program, now a freelance writer, editor, and artist. She has been making books since 1983 under the imprint never mind the press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, a BFA from CCA(c) in Printmaking. You can find her book art,…
Pitch Your Story to The Bucket
From “The Bucket” Editor, Morgan Baker: We’re thrilled that you are interested in writing for The Bucket. We have a simple question to ask: How does what you want to write help people lead a more fulfilling life by acknowledging – even embracing – their own mortality? This is our mission. And our filter for the kind of article we accept. We are looking for articles that fall under three main categories: Living Fully Dying Well Money & Law While these seem mutually exclusive, we have found them to be quite the opposite. But rather than get hung up on what goes where, just use our mission as your guide…we’ll figure out the details later. Our Brand The Bucket’s brand is bold, curious and unapologetic. We are not afraid of mortality and we want our writers to feel the same. We encourage humor, honesty and the ability to talk about…
Off Assignment
Off Assignment is a literary magazine with a penchant for journeys and a fascination with strangers, looking for writers who travel, poets who wander, essayists with a sense of place, reporters with swollen notebooks, and gourmands with street cart taste. “We’re not here to guide vacations. We don’t cover spas or centennials. We have a taste for offbeat places. We care about voice and story. We want the writer on the page—sweating, tripping, and telling a tale.” Off Assignment Submission Guidelines
Cleaver Magazine
“Cleaver” publishes craft essays on writerly topics. If you are a poet, fiction writer, essayist, or graphic narrative artist and would like to propose a craft essay, contact the editors with a query before submitting. Guidelines: offer a reaction to or exploration of one’s personal experience as a prose writer/artist/creative; pieces that delve into something you’ve either found compelling, learned along the way, figured out, gotten obsessed with, found surprising, and want to share with other writers. Quirky is okay. Nothing too scholarly/academic/ teacher-y. Aim for between 800 and 2000 words. “Riding West Towards The Woods” by Deb Fenwick is a sample of the type of writing “Cleaver” is looking for.
Waterwheel Review
Waterwheel Review publishes three pieces of writing each month, September through May, with accompanying companion pieces selected or solicited by the editors. “We hope authors will take advantage of our refusal to define what we publish, and send us un-name-able bits and pieces. A fiction that has no shape but feels complete and leaves a hole in your stomach; a nonfiction layered in obvious lies; a recipe that works like a poem. If you’re looking for a home for a sonnet or a realist short story, or any piece that happens to wear a traditional outfit, we want to see it. If the writing is fresh, artful, and engaging, if we’re moved (to cry, to clench a fist, to laugh), we want it.” Guidelines