Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
Writer’s Block happens to a lot of us. by Ruth Harris You hate your book. You hate your characters. The plot sucks. You have no talent and don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. On REALLY bad days, you even hate your computer which just sits there like a bilious toad and […]
by Anne R. Allen In a workshop I attended recently, several people criticized an author’s work because they didn’t approve of the way the protagonist behaved. They thought the character was morally deficient. First, this wasn’t good critiquing. It’s not the critiquer’s job to make moral judgements about another author’s characters. A novel full […]
Happy New Year from Ruth and Anne! It’s been a great year here at the blog. We’ve had wonderful guests who’ve written posts on everything from the nuts and bolts of Becca Puglisi’s how to write a “redeemable” villain to Jim Denney’s inspirational piece on why AI is not going to replace human creativity. Ruth […]
by Anne R. Allen Merry Yuletide! Every religion in the northern hemisphere celebrates the Winter Solstice in some way. Usually with lights to illuminate the darkest time of year, like the festival of Hanukah. In the snowy north, the European ancestors of many of us were cold and hungry, so they invented holidays to […]
by Anne R. Allen So you won NaNoWriMo! You had to skip Thanksgiving dinner with your brother-in-law’s fabulous spatchcocked turkey, and watching the game with your favorite cousins. Plus your houseplants died, your cat evaporated, and you still have your Halloween decorations up. Tip: Make some Santa hats for all your bats, witches and […]
Rudyard Kipling needed a literary agent by Mark Williams As last September ended, a report from the Association of American Literary Agents painted a bleak picture of the American literary agent — working long hours and struggling to pay the bills, worrying for their future. Among the members of the author community who had ever […]
Writing advice to keep the turkeys from getting you down. by Ruth Harris Helpful writing advice— “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham “Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, […]
by Ruth Harris The lights are red. All signs are Stop Signs. That stack of pages you thought was going to be a book? You know, with characters, a setting, maybe even a plot? Somehow, it vanished in a wasteland of false starts, dead ends and dead darlings. Why? What happened? You’re the author — […]
by Anne R. Allen A “creativity wound” is the psychological injury we feel when someone we trust says harsh, negative things about our creative work. Executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Grant Faulkner explains it like this: “We put our souls, the meaning of our lives, into the things we create, whether […]
by Anne R. Allen Social media etiquette? Does such a thing even exist anymore? When on any given day your eyeballs can be hit with posts glorifying genocide, disinformation, and alpha-thug rapists and traffickers? The answer is yes. Even though social media feels more and more like an airplane headed for a large mountain, […]
by Jim Denney I’ve been concerned about various threats from artificial intelligence for several years — threats to the economy, threats to our civil society, and even threats to human existence. I became even more alarmed about artificial intelligence when I discovered that AI systems are chronic, pathological liars. In early 2023, I began […]
Want to have a professional writing career? by Ruth Harris You started out with dreams of a professional writing career, didn’t you? And then you achieved your goals, didn’t you? But now what? You thought being a professional, published writer would liberate you from the routine of a day job. You also thought you’d be […]
by Anne R. Allen I’m often approached by parents or grandparents of children who’ve shown a talent for writing. They ask how a child can learn to be a writer. Or sometimes a person going through a mid-life job change will ask my advice about going back to college to pursue a long-deferred writing dream. […]
