Sagas | The Magic of a Storytelling Voice
Sagas are one of our most enduring story forms. In sagas the voice of a narrator takes us back into a heroic time of grand deeds, power struggles, and families pitted against one another. Sagas are about survival. Something is a stake. That’s why sagas make terrific templates for new writers. Here you sit in […]
Kick Off Your Novel With a Great First Line
The first line of your novel could be the most important sentence you write, but don’t worry about perfecting it until you’ve written all the way to the end. Your first and last lines are what connect the arc of the plot, and if you don’t yet know how the story ends, you can only […]
Setting In Fiction – A Real Life Lesson | Marylee MacDonald
Setting in fiction is inextricably bound up with character. On a cold winter day I learned this important lesson about the “relatedness” of character and setting from a young Navaho. Creighton Begay lived with his uncle in the most inaccessible part of Canyon de Chelly. Each fall he and his uncle brought in supplies by […]
Irish Writers: Why They’re Worth Reading
When I first read James Joyce, I walked the streets of Dublin. In college I met William Butler Yeats’s “Crazy Jane,” a woman accountable only to herself. I have not yet walked the cliffs of Ireland, except in the pages of books. For many Americans of Irish descent, Ireland is the Ur-land, the epicenter of […]
Photographs and Letters: Mining the Past
Who’s going to want all those photographs of our grandparents and great-grandparents? What will our children, raised in the Instagram age, make of the stiff postures and posed portraits, the sepia tones and formal attire? And yet we know these images are important. We know in our hearts that the lives buried in these studio […]
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