Dreaming Big for a Tiny Life

Alison Hall 1 Comment

I want to be a writer.  I want to write.  All day, at my laptop, in a journal.  In my little cubby hole of a space, or by a quiet river.

This dream is obsessive enough that it can depress me.  I’m forced to live in the present, each moment of my day consumed with obligatory life tasks.  You know – work?  My Aromatherapy course?  Preparing meals?  Cleaning the house?  Walking the dog?  Then there’s reading to do, spending time with my wonderful partner and her son, and sleeping!  Where does the time go… Read more

Why Do We Write?

Kelly Babcock Leave a comment

You know this question. Why do we do things? Why do we climb mountains? Travel? Have children? Eat poorly? Why? Why? Why? Each one has a different answer, so each question has the right to be asked. So let’s ask, why do we write?

Writing began simply as a means of communication. Talking is obviously the superior form of communicating, but what if that isn’t possible? Writing was an early substitute.

Writing gave the “speaker” the ability to be heard over great distances, and to be heard verbatim by two or twenty or two thousand people or even more, without having to repeat ones self. How cool is that? Read more

Happy Endings

Bernice Connell 2 Comments

Openings of short stories are actually my favourite parts to write. That’s when I am most inspired to capture a potentially great idea and create the story I envision. But this writer cannot resist spending way too much time honing the first few paragraphs, thereby losing focus and enthusiasm to complete what I’ve started.

Thus, a stack of ‘beginnings’ has been growing considerably over several years, but endings? Not so much. Recently a short story writing contest inspired me to sift through the files and choose a story to finish and submit. Read more

Research The Key To Hooking Reader

Tracey Richardson Leave a comment


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E. L. Doctorow once said, “fiction doesn’t have to be real, it just has to seem real.”

It’s a great piece of advice, and one of the basic tenets when I write fiction. Characters, setting and dialogue all help to create the “real” world of your novel. But research is the mother of it all.
I enjoy the research part of writing, which is a good thing, since my latest project required dozens, maybe even hundreds, of hours of research. And all for a short story of about 5,000 words! Read more

How I Became a Freelance Writer

Andrée Levie-Warrilow Leave a comment
I’m writing to offer you …

Yes, I’m working on a novel. And it’s coming along fine. But there’s still a long way to go until it is written, edited, published, and receiving splendid reviews and whopping cash advances from publishing houses.

Speaking of cash, I needed to generate some. I wanted to do it by writing something shorter than a great long novel. My friend suggested freelance writing. Editors are often looking for well-written articles for their magazines, he said.

Write about what interests you

OK, but what could I write about? I asked myself. I love research, I love the outdoors, and I love history. OK. My first step was coming up with an idea I thought would be fairly unique and interesting to people who also love those subjects. Once I had the idea, I fleshed out points that I wanted to cover in that article. I would return to those points later. Read more

Of Deadlines and Destiny

Diane Ferguson Leave a comment
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Image Courtesy of: sattva@FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When you’re a first-time novelist, there’s no pressure: No one is waiting for your book. In fact, if you never write it the world will never notice. So there’s lots of time for daydreaming and learning and following a whim. But when you have a deadline, the stakes are raised, the adrenaline starts pumping—gotta get this done.

And when you have several deadlines it becomes an exercise of waves of writing and editing. Here I was happily working on my second novel while tentatively pushing my first novel out into the world. It’s met with good reactions, but not great reactions. (i.e. No one has offered to publish it yet!) So I thought I’d find out why. (See earlier blog on substantive edit: https://ascribewriters.com/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#more-416  Read more

The Critique Virgin

Lori Twining 6 Comments

Yes! I am no longer a virgin!

TRW Group Critique
TRW Group Critique

I will have to say, Saturday was one of the scariest moments of my life. Entering a room full of about sixty people, armed with six copies of 10 pages of my own original writing, about to hand it over for semi-strangers to read and give their analyzed comments and criticism to me. They don’t just write down their comments on your manuscript – NO – these cringeworthy words are said OUT LOUD for ALL to hear. Okay, not everyone in the room is listening, thank goodness, just the six people at my table and any eavesdroppers who were lurking (yes, I was even worried about eavesdroppers).

So, what’s the big deal? They read it, they comment on it and you go home, right? WRONG. Read more

Walking on the Edge of Chaos

Seana Moorhead Leave a comment

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Charles Dickens walked at night, roaming the streets of London to work on plot lines.

Mark Twain paced.

J.K. Rowling stated: “Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas.”

Hemmingway also walked to think through his stories.

Is there a connection between walking and sparking creativity?

When you walk, you allow your conscious mind to access new ideas in the subconscious. For most of us, walking doesn’t take a lot of thought but does get our body moving and allows our mind to meander at the same time as our feet are wandering.

I recently listened to a radio program interviewing Eric Weiner about his new book, “The Geography of Genius”.   Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book, but I was curious enough about his idea to read online reviews, on which I based the following. I gather that his thesis is something about geography – in his theory, urban centres – being important to producing works of genius. He claims that genius thrives in chaos: in terms of geography, that means, cities. Urban centres abound with chaos as anyone from Grey and Bruce Counties knows when we try to navigate Toronto traffic. He points to historical genius figures who lived in cities, such as Mozart’s Vienna, and the Greek philosophers in Athens.

Read more