Mental Purgatory

So lately I’ve been running high on emotion what with graduating from school and starting life anew and all that hooplah. So laying out in the grass last night, I started writing and saw that the narrative was really getting caught up in that emotion. With this in mind, I started thinking of ways I [...]

So this post is going to be a double feature of story ideas. No real exciting stuff here, just some story ideas for you to chew on and for me to remember them myself.
Heaven’s Waiting Room
This piece is nearly done with a first draft, probably around 2,000 words. This could potentially be called a [...]

So as a lot of you know to some level, I entered the McKinney Writing Contest at school for fiction and essay entries. I ended up taking first place in both categories, winning for my “fiction” piece, The Best Years of Our Lives, which reflected on the passing of friendships, and for my essay, Understanding [...]

Our Creative Writing Selections return in this very rough draft. I went to the park the other day and while sitting down, decided to write this piece. It hasn’t seen a single revision, I’ve never even read it myself. I’ve simply taken it from my journal, typed it onto my computer, and placed it here. Inside, I provide a little more context as to what it is and what I was working to achieve with this post.

I thought I would use this post to discuss writing tactics based upon my own writing from last week. The piece has already seen another two revisions since then and will likely have another two before I’m confident in submitting it but it still can offer enough points of discussion. Anyways, let’s get down to [...]

As promised, I’m offering a glimpse into my own work this week so you can judge if I walk the walk as much as I talk the talk. This piece is based on the ideas presented in my Sunday piece. It’s around its fourth draft and will likely undergo two more before I’m fully happy with it. The last two paragraphs will likely be thrown out and the ending will be revised. They are from a version of the piece that started as nonfiction, and I think I’m going to redo them to make it a purely fictional piece. All comments are welcome of course. Next week I will do a discussion on revision based upon this piece with examples to help you with your own writing….

So I feel like I’ve got a reputation now of apologizing more than anything else. So today, I’m not gonna. The post is late because it’s late. Deal with it . Haha sorry, I’m just playing, let’s get down to business.

One of the interesting concepts that’s been discussed a lot lately in my writing groups is the notion of controlling the pace of your piece. Sometimes your writing will be moving WAY too quick and it leaves the reader confused and a little overwhelmed. By slowing the pace down some, you can build further suspense and give the reader more bearing. However, it’s a difficult balance as if you swing too far in the other direction, you’re going to bore your reader into passing on your writing for something a little more lively. So how can we find the compromise?

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So I’m not going to be able to post today, it’s been a hectic day, but I’d like to stick to my regiment (and Sunday will have a post, I promise). However, I’ve fortunately been working on a pet project related to Creative Writing and so, I’m going to talk about that here.

The project is Try Creative Writing, which is a collective for creative writing. I got the idea from writing this blog, and figured that if I’m going to commentate on the writing process, maybe I should build a site around that. Hence, Try Creative Writing. The site won’t be complete until this weekend, but in the meantime, I thought I’d talk about what’s there.

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So there’s an interesting problem that I’ve seen in a lot of writing. Basically, the entire process can be summarized simply in a phrase that everyone knows: “Actions speak louder than words.” Okay, actually, that’s a misnomer, that phrase doesn’t really paint the whole picture, but we’ll deal with the other half of the problem [...]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez writing is awesome for the way it seems to blend the real world with the fantastic. In a short story he wrote titled, Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles, it’s hard to draw the line between what’s real and what’s fantastic. The main character is said to be a magical healer who [...]