Yesterday in class our professor returned the synopses we wrote for our novels. I got a “B,” along with a few suggestions and critiques. Not so many years ago, I would have flared up after receiving comments on something I had written, but not anymore. Over the years I’ve learned a few techniques that help type A people such as myself handle critiques. Off the top of my head, here are a few things that help me deal with criticism:

This is kind of silly, but I wanted to save (and share) it. The beginning of my novel takes place in a bar located just off the beach. Before writing, I went back and looked at some of our vacation pictures we took in Cozumel a few years ago to set the scene in my head. Then, I opened Pandora (the free music streaming service) and searched until I found a music feed called Laid Back Beach Music. With Ziggy Marley playing softly in the background, I really got into the mood and began to visualize just what this little… (read more)

I’ve spent the past couple of days wrestling with which viewpoint I want to use in my novel. The two most common viewpoint perspectives are first and third person, with omniscient after that (and second person completely out of the question).

As a child of the 80s, I got to witness the beginning and evolution of “instant” gratification. For example, I remember when we got our first VCR. No longer did my sister and I have to wait around for our favorite television programs to come on. All we had to do was insert a video tape and, assuming we had remembered to rewind it after the previous viewing, press play and watch our favorite shows any time we wanted! I also recall our first microwave. It was big and metal and had huge dials on the front to control the… (read more)

When I wrote Commodork (my first self-published book), I had no idea what I was doing. And although I hadn’t had a lick of training, I did have a pretty good sense of story. Before I started writing I made a list of all the stories I wanted to tell in the book. Then I wrote the titles of all those stories out on index cards, sorted them into piles, and put the piles in an order that made sense to me. The piles ultimately became my chapters. Of course, my cards didn’t contain every single detail — in fact,… (read more)

I hate work assignments that involve tons of complications and political tangles and workplace drama. The writing assignment for our class is the exact opposite of all those things, and exactly the kind of assignment I like. “You owe me 25,000 words this March, and 50,000 words this May. Good luck.” In the real world, nobody checks to make sure you’ve been keeping up with your word counts and writing a little bit every day. If nothing else over the past several months, I’ve learned graduate school is no joke.