Thoughts
I write a lot. Essays. Articles. Blog posts. All of them sharing what I’m thinking about. Maybe you think about these things, too.
Write Like an Actor
How would an actor approach your protagonist? How would they take your description and the situation into which you’ve plunged the character, and make that character unforgettable?
Why Stories?
Yes, it’s true: I live in my head. Wherever my current story ideas take me. To Cuba or Nepal or California. With people who sing, or tend cows, or—sometimes—commit murder. And those places and those people are real. They may not even make it out of my head, but for the time they’re there? They are still very real.
What’s in a Name?
My characters come to life as I write, not before. They shift and morph and often change the entire narrative arc of my stories. They become who they are in chapter five, or eight, or ten. So the name I started with generally just doesn’t fit the character as they emerge, as they talk with other characters, as they make choices, as they tell me where the book needs to go.
Stuck? Try a Character Tarot Read!
Doing a Tarot read for one or more of your characters is a terrific way of seeing them in another light, giving you ideas for their personalities and histories, and providing a little more depth to the way you write them for your readers.
Wait, You’re Doing WHAT?
You locked the door to your house carefully when you went out. You come home after dark and find the door mysteriously cracked open and darkness within. What do you do?
The Liminality of Writing
That’s perhaps the real issue with liminal spaces. They’re not safe. Anything can happen there. Demons and angels dance, memories surface, words flow together into a torrent of poetry that one has only to capture to… And there it is again. It can’t be captured. My waking self has nothing in common with my liminal falling-asleep self. One of them may well be a better writer, but the other is a writer who actually gets things written.