The Road Less Written
Writers helping writers on the path to excellence
Write Everything: Get Discovered
Have you considered turning your novel into a screenplay? How about a graphic novel? Video Game? Many writers out there find that dipping their toes in multiple lakes leads to a greater chance of success, and if nothing else it will lead to more discoverability. Take...
24 Hours in Flint, Part 2: Rigor Mortis (must be 18 to read)
3:39 am A sad sort of nostalgia haunts me as I stand outside my old elementary school. As a kid, I used to get this schizophrenic notion that certain places only existed when I was present there to observe them. How could you ever actually prove otherwise? Summerfield...
24 Hours in Flint, Part One (The First 12) [Must be 18 years of age]
Just like hipsters and Scientology, the city of Flint is one of those things that’s easy to make fun of. Often referred to as “America’s murder capital”, it saw 66 murders in 2012, tying with its all-time high from just two years before. Not too shabby when you...
Creative Constipation
I like to write early. And by early, I mean that knife-edge, where-does-the-night-end-and-the-morning-begin? ass-crack-of-dawn kind of early where everyone’s still asleep and the house is quiet and even the dogs look as though they’re trying to sleep off the...
Interview with a Publisher, Tomiko Breland
Today I am happy to share my interview with Tomiko Breland, who I had the pleasure of meeting at my time in the Johns Hopkins MA in writing program. Tomiko is a fiction writer and an Associate Publisher at The Zharmae Publishing Press. She won the Ploughshares...
Why We Believe the Lies our Cerebral Cortex Tells Us
One thing I’m learning— “I’ve learned” would be a lie—is that there are no short cuts on the Road Less Written. That is, unless you do actually want to take a road to writing less. But when it comes to listening to gurus, we’re always tempted by the most unreliable...
The Power of Tabula Rasa
When suffering from writer’s block, do as the Romans do and utilize tabula rasa. Latin for “blank slate,” tabula rasa is a literary term that stretches back to the days of ancient Rome. In those days, people wrote upon wax tablets or tabula. When they wanted a new...
Re-Writing History
Grounded in my Jewish heritage, choosing to write about the Holocaust was never the question. It was how to approach it. I wanted to create something more meaningful than the recitation of facts and figures. Those brutalized by of one of history's greatest crimes...
When a Childhood Friend Dies
With just the right amount of momentum, you could go tearing down Westcombe, jump the curb into Mott Park, blaze across the rickety footbridge that spanned the Flint River and make it halfway to the golf course clubhouse without pedaling. The tricky part, of course,...
INTERVIEW WITH AN EDITOR: JERRI BELL
This week I had the great pleasure of being introduced to Jerri Bell, who was kind enough to share some thoughts with us on the process of editing and how she got to this point. Jerri Bell served in the Navy from 1988-2008. Her fiction has been published in Stone...
Redwoods Society, Learning by Doing, and the Road Less Written
Writers, by definition, have to learn by doing. “A writer writes.” Yeah, duh… It’s that “doing” that separates the dreamers from the aspirants and achievers. “A writer writes,” uttered with conviction by a fictional character, was one of the catalysts that induced me...
Persistence
To see me standing there, in the dim light of our basement, glancing around at the shelves and dark skyline of sheet-covered shapes, you'd have thought I was some rendered figure in a Lester Johnson painting. I was just, I don't know...looking, the way you...
Disclosure
