Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
She was sixteen and I was nine. I was born and raised in Singapore, in a house where books did not have to jostle for space on the shelf. There was always room for another. Majority of the books were in English, and they comprised fiction and non-fiction while a handful were in Arabic, mostly […]
By Becca Puglisi Successful stories are often ones whose elements are employed subtly. You may not be able to say exactly why they work, and as a reader, you probably don’t care; you just like the feeling of rightness that settles in as you read. Theme is one of those important elements that are quietly […]
By Ruth Harris Q: How do you know you’re a “real writer?” A: Your back hurts. So do your shouders and neck. (And maybe your hands and wrists don’t feel so great, either.) Sorry about that—I truly am—but I’ve been there and I (literally) feel your pain. Not just the existential kind resulting from rejection […]
By Sue Coletta Historical true crime requires the writer to don a detective’s hat to unearth real details about the case(s), and the research can seem daunting at times. Historical fiction also demands that the writer get his/her facts straight. Today, I offer tips to help you find reliable source material, from which to build […]
By Nate Hoffelder Authors need to be prepared to be either the guest or the host of a livestream event, and if you have never done that before, here are a few tips to get you started. When the US finally responded to the pandemic in mid-March by essentially shutting down, many of us thought […]
By William L. Hahn We often think of writing as a life filled with the once-and-done. There’s this book, we must write it; Muse willing you finish, then jot “The End” and it’s on to a completely different story. Each tale is complete, the characters exist only so long as you were penning more words […]
by Anne R. Allen I’m not sure anything stings as much as that first bad review. You’re riding high in triumph. You finished the project that may have taken decades to complete. Then you survived the crushing editing/ querying/ rejections/ revising/ editing again process. But now you’re finally a published author. Yay! Whether the publisher […]
Freewrite techniques help process the traumatic times we’re living in. by Marlene Cullen When we experience an emotional event, we tend to replay it in our minds. Sometimes we want uncomfortable situations to disappear, so we try to ignore and suppress what happened. But we don’t forget. One way to manage intense feelings is to […]
Success comes from patience, practice, and persistence. by Ruth Harris We’re living in a world where everything—pizza, groceries, shampoo, a barre class, hot sex (or, in these days of Covid-19, a sex toy discreetly wrapped)—is a click away. Even in the midst of a shelter-in-place pandemic, everything anyone—including writers—could want is at our fingertips. We’ve […]
by Ruth Harris You might have thought because you’re staying at home that you’d have more free time to start/finish a book or take an on-line yoga class. But in reality, because we’re all spending so much time at home, much of that time is consumed by eating which means food prep and cooking (which […]
by Garry Rodgers I was always the weird kid. While other boys dreamed of growing up to fly fast fighters or fight ferocious fires, I wanted to be a writer. It was like a calling. Is that weird or what? But, instead of studying fine arts or going to journalism school, when I turned twenty-one […]
A social media executor will keep you from becoming a social media ghost. by Anne R. Allen We’re living through a time when we’re forced to face something our culture prefers to ignore: our own mortality. We’re discovering, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, that although we do not stop for death, it kindly stops for us. […]
Collective grief is loud and unrelenting. But there are ways to tune it out. by Anne R. Allen There are a lot of jokes out there right now like the cartoon in The New Yorker showing a young woman saying something like “I couldn’t decide whether to work on my novel or my screenplay, so […]
Anne R Allen’s Blog With Ruth Harris