Dear Writer

Our topic for this week in our 'Culturing Creativity' space was accepting feedback. As a writer, you want to improve and be the best you can be. But sometimes feedback came come across in a negative frame that causes us to put up our defenses. So how do you cope with feedback? Listen to hear our perspective.

On another of hour craft episodes, we had a dialogue about dialogue, and included many tips on both style and grammar which we find improve dialogue and take it to the next level. Surprisingly, 'dialogue' doesn't refer only to a character's speech, but also includes action sentences, dialogue tags (otherwise known as attributions), and the emotional state and thoughts of the character before, during and after a portion of speech.

On this talking shop episode, Sarah discussed a filmed lecture series she discovered through her public library, called 'Writing Great Fiction: Story-telling Tips and Techniques'. This is a part of a wider series called 'The Great Courses.' Sarah focussed primarily on reviewing episode 1, which was about starting the writing process. Ashley turned back to books and reviewed 'Pep Talks for Writers' by Grant Faulkner, which had a wide range of mini-chapters that each touch on a different aspect of the creative process.

For this week's episode we chatted with K S Gray about their book, Color Blinded, a fictional retelling of the events and political climate that surrounded the outbreak of COVID-19. We greatly enjoyed having K S Gray on the show and discussing his process and the challenges he faced in writing and publishing this novel.

This week on our Culturing Creativity series, we explored the uses of modern technology and creativity to determine whether it is a help or hindrance on the way to becoming a published author. We discussed how we employ technology and how (for the most part) we'd be lost without it!

For this episode we talked about subplots, and how they both enhance and support your over-arching plot line. We discuss the functions of subplots, different types of subplots, and what to avoid when weaving them into your novel.

This week on Dear Writer, we shared some more resources that we've found useful. Sarah discussed 'Save the Cat Writes a Novel' by Jessica Brody, a version of Blake Snyder's original 'Save the Cat' series for screenwriters which Jessica Brody adapted for novelists. Ashley reviewed an article called 'The Rise of Strong Female Characters in YA Fantasy' by Lidia Elsdon in theJournal YA Hotline, 2020, Issue #112, Feminism and Fantasy. You can find the full article here: https://ojs.library.dal.ca/YAHS/article/view/10294

This week we interviewed Lynne Podrat. Lynne is an educator, dog trainer and author. She writes poetry, children’s books, and has a memoir out called, Listen to Me: How my Down Syndrome Brother Saved my Life. In her spare time, she does Dragon boating. We greatly enjoyed our talk with Lynne, and were in awe of her openness in sharing her unique and touching journey to becoming a writer.

This week we tried a writing exercise, titled the 'Stain Glass Poem'. This involved answering a number of questions and then reorganizing the answers into a poem of sorts. We did the exercise and talked about how it worked for us and how we think it helps to culture creativity. The exercise came from the article: Enhancing the group experience: Creative writing exercise by Kathie Wenz and J. Jeffries McWhirter (1990) in the Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 15:1, p37-42.

Last time in our long monthly episode we discussed writing beginnings. We followed that up in this month's main episode by talking about endings. We were surprised to find we did not agree on everything and had different viewpoints, but each of our opinions on endings contributed to making an interesting episode (and hopefully, interesting books!).

We had some interesting discussions about writing creating empathy in this talking shop episode. Sarah focussed on a scientific article which revealed some of the benefits of reading fiction, while Ashley presented an article about the differences between first and third person when it comes to evoking empathy in your readers.

On this author spotlight episode, we had Douglas W.T. Smith with us to talk about his recently published novella, Shadow of the Wicked, and his soon to be published novel, To Wield The Stars. Douglas has also had a variety of short stories published in magazines and was shortlisted in 2015 for a historical fiction award and in the same year for a science fiction award. We thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Douglas about his writing journey and the road so far.

Inspired by our last culturing creativity episode on games, we decided to focus on one game in particular and try it out to see how it works. The story cubes are a great writing prompt to encourage creative writing and to make connections between different concepts. Listen in to hear more of our experience.

This week for our main episode on Dear Writer, we explored beginnings. We focused on the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter, the introduction of your protagonist, and even went as far to talk about how you might plan to write the first book of a series.

This week on our talking shop episode, Sarah discussed a book she read by John Cleese, titled "Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide". Ashley was interested in a paper about historical fiction after immersing herself in research for our book. She discusses the paper "A True Story: Defining Accuracy and Authenticity in Historical Fiction" written by Laura Saxton.