"How do I begin?" The process of story creation is mysterious. Where do your story ideas come from? From where do your characters emerge? At their core, stories are born out of an impulse to make …
Memoir
Stepping Into Your True Power
What does it mean to trust yourself? It sounds like a good idea, but it is often a counter-intuitive process. It is sort of like the difference between certainty and knowing. Certainty lacks …
The Internet: A Writer’s Worst Distraction
Sometimes the deeper we get into our story, the more we seek distraction. The internet will suck the life out of any writer. It will turn the most disciplined among us into bug-eyed addicts. Not only …
What is Success?
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” - Socrates Years ago, I was on the phone with a prospective student, and he announced, “I will consider myself a failure if my book does not become a …
The Imperative for Dramatic Conflict
A director told me once that if you put two actors together in a scene without directing them or staging the scene, the conflict would begin to diminish. If the actors were on opposite sides of the …
Finding Home
“Home is where one starts from.” - T. S. Eliot There’s nothing more primal than our quest for home. The dilemma is that our childhood homes may have been confusing, chaotic, or even violent. …
No Good Guys, No Bad Guys
There are times, as storytellers, when we can be so bull-headed about what we want to express, that we end up pushing an agenda rather than telling a story. We create "good guys and bad guys," and in …
Writing the Reluctant Protagonist
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”- Ernest Hemingway Allow the Protagonist to Feel Reluctance No one likes change. The unknown is scary. The …
Memoir: Mastering the Impossible
“While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.” - Helen Keller The purpose of art is to illuminate the possibility for transformation. The goal of memoir is to make the …
One True Moment
"Where did that come from?" I believe there is something we writers are collectively seeking. We are all attempting to convey an experience, a true moment, to tell a story that somehow reveals more …