I love new words. I always get really excited whenever I learn a new word, and I try to use it as often as is applicable in my daily life. Sometimes this is harder to do than I’d like. However, this is a writing blog, and the word I learned today is a writing word. Congratulations, you get to learn about enjambments.
Happy Poetry Month! My students often scowl when I announce we’ll be reading a poem or covering *heaven forbid* an entire unit on poetry. Poetry often bothers people—it certainly bothers me in the best possible way.
Sometimes poetry feels lofty and pretentious and seems to say, “I know something you don’t know,” which is obnoxious, like an older sister taunting us. Some poetry makes us scratch our heads and say, “What the heck was that all about?”
But if we keep reading, poetry often moves us in ways a paragraph can’t. It requires a compression of language and meaning, tucked inside precise words that create concrete images. Poets, with a wink and a wry smile, trust us to read well. (Writers of all genres: we can learn so much from the poets!)
Most great stories, whether they are a Pixar film or a novel by your favorite author, follow a certain dramatic structure.
When you’re getting started with writing, understanding how the structure works is difficult. Even if you go back and analyze your favorite books and films, it can still be hard to structure your own stories. That’s where Freytag’s Pyramid can help.
This week, we lost an incredible writer. Toni Morrison was a novelist, essayist, editor, professor, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her perhaps most well-known book, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
In honor of Black History Month, I want to share five quotes from black authors that are sure to give you the push you need to write something fantastic.
Recently my publisher recommended I read the novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” by James Baldwin.
Baldwin is known by many for being a political writer during the Civil Rights movement, but what struck me about Beale Street was how he conveyed this emotion. He does such a great job making me feel Tish’s love, desperation, etc. throughout the book such that I found myself thinking, “how did he do that?”
How did Baldwin so successfully evoke emotion in Beale Street? Here are some of the answers I came up with.
Margaret Atwood is perhaps best-known for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In her MasterClass, she’ll teach you how she wrote it. Will the class help you become a better writer? We took it to find out.
