Tag Archives: teaching

Coming Up This Weekend: How to Avoid Infodumps and WTF Do I Do Now?

At least, those are my mental tags for the two classes. The first is Description and Delivering Information, and it’s how to get what you need on the page while avoiding big clumps of information and as-you-know-Bob that make a reader stumble and fall right out of the story.
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Upcoming Classes Through June

I’m in the process of adding a section on the website that permanently lists what’s coming up – it will be here and currently holds a duplicate of the info in this post. Please pass the URL to this link … Continue reading

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Figuring Out the Workshop

In May, I’ll be doing a one day workshop for Clarion West. Here’s my tentative description: Where The Sea Meets the Shore Genre and literary fiction often seem to be colliding with, sometimes deriding, each other. But truth be told, … Continue reading

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News: Offering an Online Workshop

Several people have been asking if I’d offer an online workshop and I’ve been thinking about how best to do that. So here goes. Please spread the word of this however you can. If I don’t get at least 3 students for a workshop, I’ll cancel it. Continue reading

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5 Things To Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs

Display your command of language. It’s worthwhile for a writer to think about poetry, and all its devices like assonance and alliteration, metaphor and allusion, internal rhythm, even meter. Save scraps of speech that you like, stud those paragraphs with wonderful things and spend with wild abandon from your store, because this is the make or break moment, when your reader decides whether or not to continue. You cannot lavish enough attention on your reader in the form of these paragraphs. Continue reading

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Teaching Blogging

WIth Trailmeme, the central metaphor is “trails” of links, which you can annotate. So I’ve used the outline from my Blogging class to collect my Delicious links on the topic. Here is the Blogging 101 “trail”. A cool feature of Trailmeme is the ability to discuss links – please feel free to make suggestions and/or forward the link along. Continue reading

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