Writing in 3D

We’ve all heard it before. “Your character’s flat. You need to make him three-dimensional.” Sure, great. But what exactly does that mean? We all know we live in a three dimensional world. We learn it in grade school: a line, a plane, a cube… But how do you make a character three dimensional? Do you [...]

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He Said, She Said

Great dialogue tips from Writers Circle Associate Director, Michelle Cameron: Writing dialogue is a critical aspect of fiction and memoir, and many writers struggle with it. So in a recent class, we considered what factors could comprise a successful section of dialogue. As we do in many of these more technical discussions, we deconstructed a [...]

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Thoughts on a Creative Education

What does it mean to be creative? Some people might imagine a “bohemian”, someone with no boundaries, who floats on a whim to seek the muse. Someone who dons wild clothing and wilder hair, who is as likely to fall in love as to commit suicide or murder. To be creative, you don’t have to [...]

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Writing the Body Electric

So often I begin a writing class with a simple, free-writing prompt, usually just a word or phrase – “skipping in the rain”, “amusement parks”, “the kitchen sink.” I enjoy watching the quizzical glances of my writers at these random ideas. But slowly each of them connects to some inner flash of thought or memory. [...]

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Grace in Few Words

The Writers Circle has been graced with the voices of several poets this session, some who declared themselves as such and others who have, unintentionally or out of sheer desperation, stumbled into this most challenging realm of brevity, nuance and meaning. It’s a miraculous thing to be able to distill words to their most compact [...]

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The Writer’s Journey

My son pulled a book from the bookstore shelf the other day that he thought might be good for my writing students: The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. It is written for screenwriters (which I’m not – at least not so far), so I’d never noticed it before. But I was immediately drawn to [...]

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The Gift of Prompts

I used to find writing prompts annoying. I mean, they didn’t add up to anything. They just sat there in a notebook. Magnificent or pointless, they were words that would never be published or publishable, that would probably never be read again. But lately I’ve been giving prompts in most of my classes. I’m doing [...]

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I write like…!

OK, this is a quick one, but it’s a lot of fun. An article today in the L.A. Times features a website called “I Write Like” where you can pop in a few paragraphs of text and discover which famous writer your style most resembles. I did it about ten times, selecting different sections from [...]

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We Are What We Read

I’m lucky because my boys, ages 6 and 9, still let me read to them each night before bed. They’ve graduated from children’s picture books to novels that develop psyches – Narnia, Harry Potter, the wild, wondrous world of Roald Dahl. Recently I convinced them to let me read one of my own childhood favorites, [...]

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Author, Know Your Audience

I am sometimes amused by how much I enjoy blogging after years of swearing that I’d never start a blog. I still remember the whiny voice of comedian Bill Maher mocking Americans as exhibitionists, all of us begging for someone to “READ MY BLOG!” I just couldn’t bear the thought of adding my most private [...]

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