Anne Lamott calls it her broccoli. Stephen King calls it his beast. My beast was asleep. I tried prodding him, kicking him, calling him bad names. No roars. No lightning bolts of creativity. Just me, slapping words on a page with the precision of a toddler, becoming more and more certain I was wasting my …
Tag: on writing
The Most Dangerous Thing We Do
Once this kid—my passenger—grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it hard over while I was driving. Not just a little tug, mind you, but a full-on we-gonna-die! yank. The kind that elicited a blood-curdling scream and a shouted sermon. A 19-year old preaching car safety to a 15-year-old. This kid was all charm and immortality …
A Tale of Two Writing Gigs
Yesterday I had two writing gigs. TWO! The first one was in a library where the security guards pack heat, and there are two of them patrolling the aisles. It's a library where you get buzzed into the restroom and there find lurking an odor more corrupt than King Tut's tomb or my son's gym …
2017 in the Rear View Mirror
2017. Crushed it. Really and truly. Those of you who know me know I beat myself up at regular intervals. I raise self-flagellation to an art form. My friends tell me I'm too hard on myself. If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do me no harm. I like to think I have an …
It Ain’t Easy Being Real
I'm a laissez-faire teacher, which is something out-of-control teachers say to make themselves feel better. The truth is, I'm more comfortable allowing my students to talk, so long as I can get them to say, with some degree of accuracy, what I was going to say anyway. Today we did a little self discovery. I …
How to be a Writer in November: Show up and Throw up
Want to be a writer? It's as easy as show up and throw up. Write stream-of-consciousness. Write garbage. Write your dreams, your fears, somebody else's fears... What often happens in the show-up-throw-up process is: something awesome makes its way onto the page. Inherent in the process is a throwing-off of the shackles of self-loathing and-- …
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Writing Conference Memoirette
I just attended the Lorain County Library's (awesome!) writer's conference led by Chuck Sambuchino. The most interesting moment of the conference was when Chuck read manuscripts and murdered them in front of us. Until that moment, I'd never actually experienced group tension in the flesh. It was like an invisible spider web stretched across the …
The Things I Carry
"What's it like, being dead?" "...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading." - From Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. This quote bowled me over. Not just because it's a fresh look at death, but because it captures my feelings. While I'm writing I Trespass, I'm "inside a …
The Proper Care and Feeding of the Writers in Your Life – Volume 1
Sometimes you stumble across a literary landmine. Blown away. Can I be infused with this man's sense of humor and word sense? Source: The Proper Care and Feeding of the Writers in Your Life – Volume 1
Flash Fiction for Carrot Ranch
I'm trying to leave my novel alone for a few weeks so I can read it with "fresh" eyes and polish it. Again. This polishing will be the fourth draft on I Trespass. Since I'm not actively writing my novel, my schedule is different. Like: Who moved my cheese? Normally I pick up a thread …
KL Griffiths 