Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Ruth Harris The clip file. Remember those? Gone are the days of messy, torn-out newspaper and magazine articles jammed into over-flowing, disorganized files. Those ancient artifacts have been replaced now by their neat and spiffy digital counterparts. Writers are readers and what we read is (or should be) a rich mine of ideas. […]
Rejected? Maybe it’s not you. Today we’re celebrating Ruth Harris’s 13th blogiversary. Ruth joined this blog in June of 2011, and I know it wouldn’t have succeeded without her expertise, humor, and warmth. To celebrate, we thought we’d re-run Ruth’s very first post. It’s packed with wisdom that still applies today. How to Keep […]
by Ruth Harris Style was once described as “looking like yourself on purpose.” I don’t know who said it but the words and the idea behind them always made sense to me. Certainly Barbra Streisand, Audrey Hepburn and Tilda Swinton are examples. So are Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol. They don’t look like anyone else and are instantly […]
by Ruth Harris Your agent is your representative in the publishing world. A good or great one will have wide knowledge of the current trends — are historicals hot? Is alien sci-fi romance coming up? Is medieval adventure staggering along on its last legs? Your agent will know where best to target your work, which […]
by Ruth Harris What Ray Bradbury called the muse, Stephen King calls the “guys in the basement.” Others call it the sixth sense, the Spidey sense, or intuition. Whatever you call it, your subconscious — the thoughts you don’t know you’re thinking — is what makes the magic happen. These unknown thoughts occur below the […]
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 Ruth Harris Into (almost) every book about grown-ups some sex must fall. How or even whether the details are described is up to the author, but for now let’s get beyond the nitty-gritty details of who-does-what-to-whom and what-goes-where. Instead, let’s consider some likely circumstances, consequences and complications offered by literary sex. 1) Or, […]
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 […]
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 — […]
A transition sentence is like a bridge by Ruth Harris At a writers’ workshop, I once heard a beginning writer talk about how it had taken him almost all day to write a paragraph describing his character waking up in his bedroom upstairs and going to the kitchen downstairs to make breakfast. “He made eggs […]
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 […]
Ruth Has a different kind of post for us today. She offers us a monologue by her hilarious character, Blake Weston, from “The Big Six-O,” the first in her “Cozy in the City” series. Here’s Blake facing her 60th birthday: by Ruth Harris From: Carbon paper to carbon emissions. Edward R. Murrow to Tucker Carlson. […]
Anne R Allen’s Blog With Ruth Harris