Writing Craft
Hi! I’m Taylor
I have imaginary friends.
They chatter away in the background as I go about my daily business.
They are (mostly) the ghosts of ancestors who want to be heard. And I indulge them in my Family Genealogy posts. But some… well, an occasional blog post about a discovered record was not enough to satisfy them. They wanted to be stars!
And so, Taylor MacDowell was born, for the sole purpose of giving these pushy few relatives a place to shine. Fictionally, of course.
-
What Price, Charlie?
Week 5 of the 100-words-per-week Serial Novel (which is technically Flash Fiction) exercise at the Writing Forum has come and gone. Over a month ago, I’m afraid [1]. Still, I owe you the conclusion to my wee story [2]. So, without further ado…
-
Construction 101 reprise
It’s Week 4 of the 100-words-per-week Serial Novel (which is technically Flash Fiction) story I’ve been working on in the Writing Forum Exercises I participate in. This week, we addressed the Climax and Resolution of the story typically found in Act III of a 3-Act format and the six prompts to work into the narrative…
-
Construction 101
Part 3 of the 5 Part Series on Serial Novels Building a story is a bit like building a house.
-
The next 100 words
You might remember from last week that I’m participating in a month-long writing exercise building a short story [1], one-hundred words at a time. Last week, we tackled the introduction: a hundred words to acquaint the reader with the characters, setting, and develop a story question or inciting incident. This week, we move on to…
-
Serial Novels
Before television… before radio… many people got their fiction fix via serial novels. [1] This is especially true for Rose in the late 1920s and early 1930s. While radios were getting their start, it wasn’t until the mid-30s that nearly every household could afford one. And since books were expensive and libraries few and far…
-
At the Garden
I was reading an article about jazz in the Time-Life special edition on the Roaring Twenties [1] that I recently purchased when I read about a band in Chicago that was tantamount to the rise of that particular music genre. Of course, that got me thinking about my W-I-P, as all things related to that…
-
Give me rhubarb…
I have a thing about rhubarb pie. It’s deep-seeded, to be sure, since I haven’t had a bite of that particular pastry since I was a child. My paternal grandmother made them. She died when I was ten. [1] So when the LitForum‘s Writer’s Exercise [2] for March was to “write a scene in which…
-
Author Intrusion
As a writer, one always questions if a character is being true to their own nature or whether the author is projecting his or her own moral belief system or code of action upon them. To be clear, you don’t want the latter. That’s called Author Intrusion. Sometimes, however, it seems impossible to keep the…
-
Writers’ Games
Sometimes, when words are hard to find, my writing group plays a little game. We spin for prompts, which are just words or phrases that have been plucked from various sources and added to a numbered list, and then see what we can write that includes one or all of the prompts. Occasionally, the resulting…
-
And then what happened?
Some writers are blessed with the innate knowledge of where their story is going. Others just write and let the story take them where it will. In the writing world, this phenomena is generally categorized as Plotter-vs-Pantster.