I got an email this morning from one of my students who just received a pile of notes on her work-in-progress and was feeling overwhelmed and unsure on how to proceed. Typically, I had some …
Rewriting
The Imperative for Dramatic Conflict
A director told me once that if you put two actors together in a scene without directing them or staging the scene, the conflict would begin to diminish. If the actors were on opposite sides of the …
Why We Go on Retreat
For years, my students had been asking me when I was going to take them on a retreat. Frankly, I'd been on creative retreats, and while I enjoyed the camaraderie, I was never a big fan of …
Banishing Redundancies
Redundancy is not only a sign of lazy writing; it can also pull us out of the story by interrupting the narrative flow. There are many types of redundancies in writing, from rehashing story …
Writing Prose
“Prose is architecture, not interior design.” – Ernest Hemingway Our words are in service to our story. When we get too flashy with our adjectives, we may distract and even confuse our reader in …
The Courage to be Specific in Writing
Humans are full of paradoxes. We only love to the extent that we hate. We are constantly changing our minds, constantly renegotiating with ourselves and others. To be specific is to be curious about …
Juxtaposition
The rewrite process can sometimes lead us into a rut. Our attempts to make our work as clear and specific as possible can begin to feel routine. So sometimes we need to mix things up and get a little …
Simplicity
Forward, he cried From the rear And the front ranks died. Pink Floyd (Us and Them) We can tell a whole world in a sentence. The rewrite is where we polish our prose until it …
The Arc of a Scene
“I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.” – Plato In the rewrite, we seek to make our story as …
Staying Connected to the Source
"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination." - Albert Einstein The rewrite uses the left and right brain simultaneously. …