In short stories and novels, fantasy in particular, readers want to be present or transported to the scenes of the story. One of the best ways to do such a feat is to ‘Evoke the Emotions and Employ the Senses.’
Poetry should be no different.
After over a year of thinking and planning, in November my friend Jeff Goins and I launched Story Cartel, a site to help authors share their stories with readers.
The Mayans were right. The world ended today.
Write about the end of the world for fifteen minutes. When your time is up, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post, be sure to comment on a few practices by other writers.
Unless you have been living in a hobbit hole, you probably know J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous novel, The Hobbit, has been adapted for film and is coming out this Christmas season. If you’re a die hard Tolkien fan, you may have already bought your tickets for the midnight show (I haven’t, but I did make plans to see the Friday matinee).
The Hobbit is one of the best selling books of all time, selling over 100 million copies since it was published in 1937. Needless to say, there are a few things every writer, regardless of their genre, can learn from it.
Real writers read. Writers read the classics. Writers read bestsellers in their genre. And writers read the work of their peers.
The problem with today’s market is there are just too many books to be read. How do you know if what you’re reading is going to be any good, especially if it’s a writer I haven’t heard of before?
Personally, I have so much reading to do, I’m rarely interested in reading books by writers I don’t know. Why take the risk?
And this is exactly why we’ve created the Show Off Anthology.
In my creative writing class when students are required to write a short-story, they often write about themselves. It’s a good idea to write what you know, and I’ve encouraged some to turn their story into a memoir.
