A Teachable Moment

Okay, I’m getting caught up with some bloggery reading I’ve put off (not because I have the time, but because I get distracted by… Oh, shiny). You never know when the Black Hole of Calcutta will sneak up and devour you. But here is a teachable moment, and the lesson is, “ideas aren’t yours alone.” [...]

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“A Matter of Trust: song and dance” part 4

But it isn’t enough to write a story. There has to be a reader for that story, and it can’t be just you.
“A story is a collaboration between teller and audience, writer and reader. Fiction is not only illusion, but collusion….Without a reader there’s no story. No matter how well written, if [...]

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“A Matter of Trust: song and dance” part 3

Action, high emotion, and those scenes which are being PITAs (pains in the ass) cause me some writer’s block usually because I want them to be perfect. It is also called stage-fright and over-rehearsing, the bane of every performer. I CAN force my right brain on stage at gunpoint, under the lights, and [...]

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“A Matter of Trust: song and dance” part 2

But what is this about trusting the story? You’re the one writing it, for pity’s sake, how much more trust is there to give?
“…to trust the story….means being willing not to have full control over the story as you write it. First you have to learn how to write English, and [...]

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“A Matter of Trust: song and dance” part 1

Ursula K. Le Guin says in her essay, “A Matter of Trust,”
“In order to write a story, you have to trust yourself, you have to trust the story, and you have to trust the reader….Before you start writing, neither the story nor the reader even exists, and the only thing you have to trust is [...]

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Everything I needed to know I learned in 6 years of college (except for everything I needed to know). – On the Spot!

One thing our visual design instructors instilled in us was the ability to be creative on demand. Design (graphic, information, way-finding, etc) is a business. You don’t have time to wait for the Muse to come in, she has to be on the clock. You might get a new client at 8am and have to [...]

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I learned everything I needed to know in 6 years of college (except everything I needed to know) – Critiques

As I said, I have a BFA. That means a large whopping percent of my college career was spent in art classes. And while the other disciplines in the school had critiques less often (maybe twice a week), for the graphic design program we were critiqued on our output every single class. If you took [...]

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I learned everything I needed to know in 6 years of college (except everything else I needed to know) – What price art.

This one is going to piss off a few people. To start off you need to know that I hold a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Akron Meyer’s School of Art. I have a lot of Art History floating around in my cerebellum, including a bunch that most people have never seen [...]

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An Idea Saved Isn’t an Idea Earned

One of the things I’ve gotten over since I started writing (I think this came in as either the second or third Big Writing Revelation(tm)) is saving ideas. At a certain point in the writer’s life, you realize that you’re creating crap, but that you have to go through that woodland crap to get to [...]

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Got Villain?

Let’s talk about the hero and the fatal flaw. No one is perfect, therefore the hero has to have at least one flaw to be overcome during the climax.
Hero + flaw = character arc = believable character.
But, how does the hero get to the point of needing to grow beyond their flaw? [...]

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