Last month, I spent an indeterminate, yet still large number of hours drawing trees for Julie of Julie V. Photography… The experience left me ruminating upon some of the clear parallel between my drawing craft and my writing craft. Gather ’round, my dearest inklings, and I shall share with you the wisdom the aforementioned parallel doth impart…
Tweet This week I’m talking about scripted solutions and the power of programming for a writer. I know it might sound intimidating, but learning a programming language isn’t that much harder than learning any other kind language, and in the same way, some are easier than others. I almost want to say, “Learning Python is […]
Tweet Writers are not naturally programmers. I’m certainly aware of that. In fact, I resisted becoming one for years even though all my friends were. When I finally broke down and accepted some lessons from my friend Toby, though, it changed the way I approach everything I do on the computer. Some tasks require a […]
Tweet Last fall I walked into my first ever teaching experience, with that junior-level Technical Writing course at Oklahoma Christian University that I’ve mentioned a time or two. I faced a room full of Computer Science and Information Systems students who were all within sight of their graduation, and faced with the first English class […]
Tweet This week I’m talking about inviolable writing rules (and ranting against the storytelling in The Da Vinci Code). Yesterday I provided a list of rules that I said you should never break, then I admitted that most books break at least one of those, and I closed by saying, “Well, fine, you can break […]
Tweet Okay, first things first, I keep forgetting that I’ve got readers who have never taken a Creative Writing class. If you missed out on that (and, I guess, Latin classes too), then yesterday’s post ended with a much more mysterious cliffhanger than I intended. And, worse, I’m not actually going to get into detail […]
Tweet One lazy Saturday a couple months ago I emerged from a couple hours of writing in the office to find Trish sitting on the couch in the living room watching The Da Vinci Code. She’d seen it before — I’m pretty sure I went to see it at the theater with her — and […]
We of the storytelling craft often use the term “thread” when discussing the thematic elements that hold our tale together. It’s a perfect metaphor, because we do, indeed, weave those elements in and out of the plot, binding characters and events together into a unified whole. But problems arise during the weaving because we use the wrong threads…
Tweet I’ve been investigating document types for a while now, and this week I’ve been talking about grant writing — the common name used for writing grant applications. It’s enough of a complicated process that it does have its own name (albeit a slightly confusing one). It’s not that writing grant applications is puzzling. Virtually […]
Tweet Yesterday I told a story about my little girl learning to read. She hasn’t got the patience to read a whole block of text yet, though. She’ll start at the beginning, and if she doesn’t recognize the first word, she says, “I can’t read this page!” And that’s it. She pushes the book away […]
