How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers

From the category archives:

Miscellaneous

Who will hold your hand?

July 13, 2010

A Sideways student asked her classmates to name their ideal mentors–aside from Holly–who would offer tips on writing as well as on the business, political, and emotional aspects of the writing life. Surprising answers as well as related questions arose.  Log in to learn what others say and then share your own thoughts on the [...]

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I’ll see your paperclip, and raise you two curtain rings.

May 17, 2010

Week 3 of How to Revise Your Novel brings up the delight of Scene Cards.  Maybe 50 or 100 of them.  You do not want these little darlings loose on the table when the dogs and kids run through, dragging their contrails behind them.  What to do?  Corral them, round them up, put them in [...]

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Does the cat aid the revision process?

April 16, 2010

We are proud and happy to announce a new forum in Holly Lisle’s Writers’ Boot Camps: HTRYN (How To Revise Your Novel) Lite.  This forum is for the grand folks who took Holly’s Crash Revision Course at Savvy Authors (wow, I’m running out of capital letters) and who wanted to continue their writing community.  The [...]

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New Technique – Revised One-Pass Revision – Added

January 15, 2010

As promised, I’m continuing to add to and upgrade the HTTS course.  This week, in Lesson 22, I’ve added an excerpt from Lesson 10 of the How To Revise Your Novel course that gives the long-promised steps to my REVISED One-Pass Revision.  If you’re at Lesson 22 of the course or later, you can pick [...]

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What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

January 6, 2010

It’s been an intense month for the How to Revise Your Novel students, but every lesson has been worth the effort.  Week 5 is about finding and understanding the conflict that’s already in the first draft.  Many of the surprises have been sweet.  One student expresses the joy of her discovery: For the first time [...]

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Whose story is it, anyway?

December 4, 2009

She was doing fine, writing her NaNovel, when an unplanned character appeared on her page and stole her heart, outdazzling her main character and taking over the stage. Is this a wonderful gift from the muse, or just a case of that shiny object flitting across her screen and derailing a perfectly good tale? That [...]

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Sentencing Phase

November 27, 2009

When a Sideways student needed to practice designing The Sentence, she created this topic and invited others to join her in teasing out The Sentence of famous stories. This is a valuable exercise–and a lot of fun, too.  Join in the game to sharpen your story focus. The Sentence — practice

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Urbs in Yer Chester Drawers

November 20, 2009

Writers love words as fresh meat loves salt.  What’s to love?  Meaning, etymology, usage, pronunciation, rhythm, rhyme and harmony. At least. Powerful things, words.  Lively discussion this.  It started quite some time ago, but it’s evergreen, so take a look and offer your take on commonly abused English words. The Most Often Mispronounced Words in [...]

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Perchance to Dream Sequence

October 30, 2009

Paranormal dreams.  Backstory dreams.  Dreams that stop the story dead or give it a frisson of the extraordinary.  Here’s a discussion that touches on these subjects and more. Dreams and why we hate them

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Eureka! A skeptic meets the muse

August 12, 2009

From a deeply skeptical student: I’ve never really believed in the concept of a “muse.” To be honest, I’ve always rolled my eyes a little bit when other writers start talking about their muse like it’s a roommate that lives down the hall. I am a left-brained logical person, and the concept of having a [...]

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