The literary world attributes le mot juste, or “the exact word,” to 19th-century author Gustave Flaubert: “All talent for writing consists, after all, of nothing more than choosing words. It’s precision that gives writing power.” Beyond this pointed sentence, the author dropped plenty of good lines about style: “Style is as much under […]
T.S. Eliot popped into my mind today. After all, April begins. He called it the cruelest month. However, today my thoughts drift to two powerful lines that open Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Drink in the wonder. Change does not always necessitate pain—it can be beautiful. Embrace the season. Whan that Aprille […]
Poems (however you define them) pop up en masse—greeting cards, chipper FB graphics, literary zines, blogs, chapbooks, open mic nights. Heck, I once discovered a blog that featured a daily a.m. haiku homage to a young woman’s lover. The images grew tiresome after a few days—a sheet trailing carelessly to […]
A promise begins the newly released book How to Write Winning Short Stories: “Let this be a practical little manual of tips, designed to provide accessible, actionable advice to short story writers, particularly beginning or emerging writers, who want to write short stories for adult readers.” Author Nancy Sakaduski sticks to this […]
A few days after Santa dropped by, I yelled at my computer. It. Was. Slow. I. Was. Irritated. I argued with a thing. Why? A smart friend told me to get the monkeys off my back and the chatter out of my brain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I joined in the […]
