From the category archives:

Creative Writing

Cinderella – The Gold Standard of Fairy Tales

September 6, 2010

Image via Wikipedia The Romance Plot Thread Enjoy them or despise them, a romantic plot thread, as long as it’s not gratuitous, enhances most stories. Otherwise, Top Gun wouldn’t have had the guy get the girl in the end.  An Officer and A Gentlemen was the same story simply written for a female audience.   [...]

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Gender Bias

August 25, 2010

Recently, I was reminded of the scene from the film As Good As It Gets where the novelist Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson’s character) is talking to a receptionist. She asks Udall, “How do you write women so well?” and he replies, “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.” Is there [...]

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Iconic Romantic Heroines – Intro

August 23, 2010

Image via Wikipedia I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good romance story. It’s not surprising since Disney has been inoculating the female population with their fairy tale versions of Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty for generations now. Add in the role models created by Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott and the Bronte sisters, [...]

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“Our doubts are traitors…” Measure for Measure (I.iv.77)

August 11, 2010

Image via Wikipedia In his collection of journals entitled Confessions of a Barbarian, the twenty-five-year-old Edward Abbey ponders the progress he is making on his first novel: “The novel, my terrible novel, will drive me to ruin…A frightful labor! “And the worth of it, the quality—the problem worries me night and day. At times I’m [...]

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The Truth About Workshops

August 9, 2010

Taking a manuscript into a critique workshop is an expedient and sometimes necessary step to understand how readers view and respond to any given piece you’ve written. At their best, a workshop is a coming together of equally skilled and similarly committed writers under the guidance of a master of the trade, both as writer [...]

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