Dear Readers. From now on I’ll be posting on Thursday mornings instead of Saturdays. Here’s why.
The Writing Room
I’m a writer who loves to talk about writing, so if you’re a writer or an aspiring writer I hope you'll stop by now and then and keep me company . . . You’ll find writing tips here as well as my thoughts on the writing life. Watch out, though. The Grammar Geek will be putting in her two cents from time to time.
Writing Tips — Begged, Borrowed, but Mostly Stolen From My Favorite Writing Coaches
I’ve been writing personal essays, newspaper columns and blog posts for years now. I’ve learned some writing tricks the hard way — by trial and error. Others I’ve just plain stolen from my various writing coaches. Here are some of my favorite personal essay writing tips.
Writing the Personal Essay — Forget the Good, Go for the Bad and the Ugly
When I’m writing a personal essay or a blog post, I find that nice stories in which I behave well and come off looking good generally don’t work so well. I look for the bad story, the ugly story, the story that shows off my marvelous human shortcomings.
The (Two-Year-Old) Rhetorician at Our House
What’s rhetoric? I’ve always thought of it as the high-flown language of politics. But really, it’s something we humans do all the time, and that includes the two-year-old humans among us.
‘Read Me a Story, Mommy, But Not That One You Wrote’ (Or,The Nicest Thing My Husband Ever Said to Me)
To save money, management had cut my hours back to one day a week. I did what every self-respecting writer does when she’s ticked off at the world. I sat down at the keyboard – and wrote. Read more.
Walk 1000 Miles Around Lake Michigan? She Did It — Now I Don’t Have To
Walk around Lake Michigan . . . the whole thing. I’d start in late spring and finish up in the fall. And when I was done, I’d write a book about it. Lucky for me, Loreen Niewenhuis beat me to it.
Ceramics Envy at the Berkeley Art Center — I Want to Get My Hands into that Earthy, Messy, Squishy Clay
I’m a writer, but whenever I visit my friend Nancy Selvin’s ceramics studio, I wonder whether I’d rather be working with something more tangible than words and ideas — like clay.