WHEN LEARNING THE CRAFT OF WRITING — which, as far as I am concerned, is a never-ending state of being — we often hear the refrain that we should “show, not tell.” “Showing” means writing in scene, using physical actions, sense-based details, and dialogue to create the story, rather than explaining […]
A CLOSE READING of any book helps us to understand how an author’s word choice and sentence structure affect the tone and pace of the work. For this examination of Beryl Markham’s *West With the Night, I decided, (rather arbitrarily) to use excerpts from Chapter V, “He Was a Good […]
IN CHALLENGING TIMES, it is easy to get lost in the dark or negative aspects of what is going on around us and forget to look for the good—especially when newspapers and online media sensationalize the negative in order to take advantage of our natural, though morbid, sense of curiosity. […]
ANYONE WHO HAS WRITTEN A MEMOIR KNOWS that it’s hard work. Not at the beginning, necessarily, but when you’re part way through, and that nice, round idea you had of your story has become fragmented by scenes and summaries of scenes, and reflections about those scenes The memories aren’t clear […]
