How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers

From the category archives:

Eureka!

What’s in a Theme?

March 9, 2010

Very often, what’s in a theme is a huge, humbling surprise.  Your you was working out plot details and making sure each scene had a proper structure and stressing over margins or typeface.
Your Muse was quietly revealing your heart, because that’s the beat she marches, slinks, bounces or tangos to.
HTRYN’s worksheets on theme have brought [...]

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Hey–How’d You Like to Build a World?

March 2, 2010

Don’t you love it when you learn how to fix a problem you didn’t even know you had?  That’s what happened for this HTRYN student:
Okay, I was guilty of the “I don’t need this, my story is set in the here and now” mindset when I first read this lesson material.   BUT, I figured I [...]

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Escalating Conflict–It’s a Good Thing.

February 24, 2010

When real life is peaceful, calm, serene, yet informative, we rejoice.
When fiction is peaceful, calm serene, yet informative, we yawn, put down the book and go clean the gutters.
Lesson 5 of How to Revise Your Novel analyzes the overall conflict as well as the scene conflict and then brainstorms it higher and tighter and more [...]

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Dreaming the Muse

February 16, 2010

This HTRYN student got an effortless insight, courtesy of the Muse who visits sleeping artists.
I had an experience last night/this morning that will help me explore a sub-theme and may illuminate a lot of threads in my revision novel. . . .
I dreamed. . . .
In the dream, I felt a sense-of-wonder jaw drop. I [...]

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Competition Deadline met with Grace.

February 9, 2010

This HTRYN student didn’t wait for the course to be complete–she has already begun to use her new insights in writing and submitting a short story.
I have read the materials about promises, and applied them to that story. It was an absolute revelation! I was so happy to see that in most places my intuition [...]

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The Happy Writer’s Weather Report

January 25, 2010

A student of How To Revise Your Novel reports:
Today I moved on to Lesson 5 and after writing the first conflict on the first note card, the beginning of the story – the opening concept I had been struggling with since I began writing this book back in November – fell into place. At that [...]

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Leave the petals on the daisy–

January 13, 2010

Here’s a better way to sort through the carnival parade also known as First Draft.
Week 4 of How to Revise Your Novel teaches how to find those scenes that are part of the plot or part of the subplot or–Oh! the Pain!–part of the notplot.
Here students discuss the downside and the upside of this process [...]

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Cutting out the middle man.

January 9, 2010

This thoughtful Sideways Student admits:
I had no intention of killing off anyone major in the story, yet I wasn’t surprised by which character came to mind first when I considered it as a possibility. She’s a great character and an important minor antagonist, but I dreaded having to continue her as a story thread into [...]

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You promised the reader–what?

December 26, 2009

Week Two of HTRYN tracks down the promises implied in the first draft.  Easy, right?  Here’s part of the beginning of a discussion on just that topic:
I could not believe the work I needed to do for lesson two, but I persisted. Am I glad I did. . . .
Now I know exactly where each [...]

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The Writer’s Heart and Head Work Together

December 10, 2009

The first week of How To Revise Your Novel has revealed a lot about the manuscripts under revision.
The great thing about the worksheets, for me, is that when I first started revising the current WIP, back in July, I had an instinct/feeling for what wasn’t right and went about correcting it. But with the worksheets [...]

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