Posted in Business Writing, Personal Essays on May 16th, 2012
For some of the creative writing classes I teach—thankfully, not all—I’m paid according to the number of students who enroll. Each student pays a very modest amount, so a small class means small remuneration for me. After recently teaching six students at an arts center, I screwed up my courage and told the personable program [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips on Dec 29th, 2011
I recently interviewed Leslie Fulton for a guest post about the conflicts between being both a business and a creative writer. Since she sent me a good deal of interesting information about her approach to writing, I said I’d like to share it here, as a guest post. You can read it below. – Lynette I [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips on Dec 28th, 2011
I recently interviewed writer Michele Chiappetta, The Chipper Muse, for a guest post I was writing for The WM Freelance Writers Connection. Some of her responses appear in the post, When Business and Creative Writing Clash. But Michele offered so many other useful insights on the tensions between being a business and a creative writer [...]
Posted in Fiction on Dec 5th, 2011
Recently the extraordinary teens in my creating writing class read from their work in a public forum. It’s true the audience was mostly made up of the teens’ relatives, but even that’s meaningful. Some of my students had never allowed their parents to see their work before. And trust me, their writing is worth sharing. [...]
Posted in Family History, Memoir Writing on Nov 2nd, 2011
To prevent narrators from coming across as a whiny victims, modern memoirs seem to require that the narrators take responsibility for their complicity in the disasters they’re recording. There are times in life when s**t happens, when you’re standing on a street corner with your back safely against a building, and a taxi jumps the [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips, Fiction on Sep 10th, 2011
Are there books you turn to again and again to inspire your muse or strengthen your writing? This post (and a few to follow) is about those books I most often recommend to my creative writing students. Why? Because each of these books covers a lot of ground in an easy, accessible way. You won’t [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips on Aug 27th, 2011
If you’ve been doing something else with your life up to now (and who hasn’t?), go ahead and start identifying as a writer. It’s not necessary to tell others that you’re a writer, but it’s critical that you tell yourself. Believe it in your heart. Believe it in your soul. You are a writer. [...]
Posted in Essays, Hating Your Book, Memoir Writing on Jun 5th, 2011
Even as accomplished a writer as Daniel Nester, the irreverent author of How to Be Inappropriate (love that title!), occasionally hates his manuscript. What follows is my interview with Nester about his writing—when it’s going well and, er . . . not so well. – Lynette What are you working on these days? I feel [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips, Personal Essays on Jun 1st, 2011
I Had It All Wrong My early fantasies of the writing life bore no relation to reality, saturated as they were with a determined sentimentality. I must have gotten my ideas from photos I came across in which writers were always pensively portrayed in workspaces that overlooked meadows and streams drenched in dappled sunlight. [...]
Posted in Hating Your Book, Memoir Writing, My Mother's Money on Apr 4th, 2011
It’s not uncommon for writers to experience intermittent loathing for the books they’re writing. I hate the one I’m working on because it forces me to recall unpleasant details of my search my mother’s money—and it shines a spotlight on previously unknown tensions in my small immediate family. However, writer Judi Coltman, author of Is It [...]
