ByGD
When my daughter was in the first grade, her teacher used this worksheet to teach them story structure. Never mind that I never had a lesson in story structure in any grade. Even studying story as an adult, this is still one of the most efficient ways to diagram a narrative that I’ve seen. I’ve hung onto the worksheet because I think it’s useful.
ByGD
You know when you find a $20 bill in the laundry? I was having a hard time coming up with a blog topic for today when I found a post I wrote in early November, on the day I felt like I was coming down with a cold. It is no less relevant today for the month it spent forgotten in my files:
I know this comes as no surprise to the literary among you, but writing fiction is hard. Read More
ByGD
Fiction changes lives. I haven’t written fiction since middle school. (Except that one NaNo novel in 2008, but that was therapy.) Even so, I am subject to that universal writerly neurosis – I secretly think that deep inside me lies hidden the great American novel. At least I think it’s universal. Maybe other technical writers are perfectly happy with what they do. Maybe novelists secretly dream of writing that perfectly researched narrative nonfiction.
Anyway. When I got back from Airwaves, an idea for a story popped into my head; a few characters, some themes, a couple of scenes. This is nothing new in itself. I’ve walked around narrating stories in my head that I had no intention of ever writing down since – well, since I stopped writing them down in middle school. But these characters wouldn’t go away. Whatever else I was doing, a part of my brain was thinking about these broken characters and the shit they were going through. Since another good chunk of my brain has been following my kids around in this manner for the past five years, it left precious little attention for the tasks at hand, which has, unfortunately, been noted at the day job. Read More