I’m working on a writing project right now and I want it to have a touch of funny. It’s been my experience that whenever I try to implement a specific strategy to elicit a certain emotional response from the reader, I feel as though I’m bleeding from my brain. It is HARD to be funny! I have so much respect [...]

I was standing in the shower this morning doing the zombie stance. Head back, water hot, eyes closing not because of steam, but because I was falling asleep standing up. And I started to wonder if I was taking on too much. There’s this blog, the new blog, the Chicken Soup essay, a new weekly contribution which I’ll talk more [...]

In my last post I wrote about recognizing our influences. Today, I’d like to discuss using this information now that we’ve revealed what it is. There are two ways we can go here. We can embrace our influences and work towards incorporating them as much as we can while still maintaining our originality, or, we can shut them out and [...]

Novelist and Blogger Charles Gramlich of Razored Zen (which I read religiously) has recently posted on how our influences can affect how we create. He writes Being “unconscious” of one’s sources has potential risks and potential benefits. On the risk side, it’s possible to stay so close to the original that you are simply writing pastiche. On the benefit side, [...]