Dear Writer

On our talking shop episode this week, we have two new resources to review. Sarah talked about another grammar book: 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' by Lynne Truss. Ashley's choice for this month was a book called 'Writing for Emotional Impact' by Karl Iglesias.

On this author spotlight episode, it was a pleasure to welcome Kat Winters onto the show, to talk about her writing experiences. Kat is an American writer born and raised in California, and writes to give people hope, featuring diversity and inclusivity in her novels. We immensely enjoyed talking to Kat and learning about her book, 'Free Me.'

Our topic for this week in our 'Culturing Creativity' space was accepting feedback. As a writer, you want to improve and be the best you can be. But sometimes feedback came come across in a negative frame that causes us to put up our defenses. So how do you cope with feedback? Listen to hear our perspective.

On another of hour craft episodes, we had a dialogue about dialogue, and included many tips on both style and grammar which we find improve dialogue and take it to the next level. Surprisingly, 'dialogue' doesn't refer only to a character's speech, but also includes action sentences, dialogue tags (otherwise known as attributions), and the emotional state and thoughts of the character before, duri...

On this talking shop episode, Sarah discussed a filmed lecture series she discovered through her public library, called 'Writing Great Fiction: Story-telling Tips and Techniques'. This is a part of a wider series called 'The Great Courses.' Sarah focussed primarily on reviewing episode 1, which was about starting the writing process. Ashley turned back to books and reviewed 'Pep Talks for Writers'...

For this week's episode we chatted with K S Gray about their book, Color Blinded, a fictional retelling of the events and political climate that surrounded the outbreak of COVID-19. We greatly enjoyed having K S Gray on the show and discussing his process and the challenges he faced in writing and publishing this novel.

This week on our Culturing Creativity series, we explored the uses of modern technology and creativity to determine whether it is a help or hindrance on the way to becoming a published author. We discussed how we employ technology and how (for the most part) we'd be lost without it!

For this episode we talked about subplots, and how they both enhance and support your over-arching plot line. We discuss the functions of subplots, different types of subplots, and what to avoid when weaving them into your novel.

This week on Dear Writer, we shared some more resources that we've found useful. Sarah discussed 'Save the Cat Writes a Novel' by Jessica Brody, a version of Blake Snyder's original 'Save the Cat' series for screenwriters which Jessica Brody adapted for novelists. Ashley reviewed an article called 'The Rise of Strong Female Characters in YA Fantasy' by Lidia Elsdon in theJournal YA Hotline, 2020,...

This week we interviewed Lynne Podrat. Lynne is an educator, dog trainer and author. She writes poetry, children’s books, and has a memoir out called, Listen to Me: How my Down Syndrome Brother Saved my Life. In her spare time, she does Dragon boating. We greatly enjoyed our talk with Lynne, and were in awe of her openness in sharing her unique and touching journey to becoming a writer.

This week we tried a writing exercise, titled the 'Stain Glass Poem'. This involved answering a number of questions and then reorganizing the answers into a poem of sorts. We did the exercise and talked about how it worked for us and how we think it helps to culture creativity. The exercise came from the article: Enhancing the group experience: Creative writing exercise by Kathie Wenz and J. Jeffr...

Last time in our long monthly episode we discussed writing beginnings. We followed that up in this month's main episode by talking about endings. We were surprised to find we did not agree on everything and had different viewpoints, but each of our opinions on endings contributed to making an interesting episode (and hopefully, interesting books!).

We had some interesting discussions about writing creating empathy in this talking shop episode. Sarah focussed on a scientific article which revealed some of the benefits of reading fiction, while Ashley presented an article about the differences between first and third person when it comes to evoking empathy in your readers.

On this author spotlight episode, we had Douglas W.T. Smith with us to talk about his recently published novella, Shadow of the Wicked, and his soon to be published novel, To Wield The Stars. Douglas has also had a variety of short stories published in magazines and was shortlisted in 2015 for a historical fiction award and in the same year for a science fiction award. We thoroughly enjoyed speaki...

Inspired by our last culturing creativity episode on games, we decided to focus on one game in particular and try it out to see how it works. The story cubes are a great writing prompt to encourage creative writing and to make connections between different concepts. Listen in to hear more of our experience.

This week for our main episode on Dear Writer, we explored beginnings. We focused on the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter, the introduction of your protagonist, and even went as far to talk about how you might plan to write the first book of a series.

This week on our talking shop episode, Sarah discussed a book she read by John Cleese, titled "Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide". Ashley was interested in a paper about historical fiction after immersing herself in research for our book. She discusses the paper "A True Story: Defining Accuracy and Authenticity in Historical Fiction" written by Laura Saxton.

Today on our author spotlight we had Jonathan Reddoch and Elizabeth Suggs from Collective Tales Publishing. Jonathan and Elizabeth both have a passion for writing and are focused on writing and publishing speculative, horror and science fiction stories. Their first anthology, Collective Darkness, was the #1 Amazon bestseller for new horror anthologies. We talked to Elizabeth and Jonathan about the...

On this Culturing Creativity episode, we geeked out over games and discussed how different games may enhance your creativity, and can sharpen skills that are useful in your writing. Who knew that playing games could have such great perks?

This week we had our promo episode for When the Rain Falls, our first novel which is due to release in October. Listen in to hear all about our characters and be the first to hear the book's blurb. We also recapped old times, which included reading terrible excerpts from the original version of the book we wrote fifteen years ago.

On this talking shop episode, Sarah reviewed a book she believes every writer should have in their toolkit: 'The Emotion Thesaurus' by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. Ashley reviewed a chapter on dystopian fiction in the academic book, 'Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Young Adult Fiction' by Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Alane Wilson.

In our author spotlight this week is Kira Leigh. We had a scintillating conversation with Kira about their book series, Constelis Voss, and their process as an author. Our discussion ended up diving deep beneath the surface. We explored the topic of writing diverse characters, and discussed how important it is to ask hard questions about life and society while creating your work.

On this culturing creativity episode, we discussed how where and when we write can effect the productivity, and—in some cases—the quality of our writing. This discussion included a very amusing breakdown of barriers we have found with writing both in cafes and outdoors. We talked about our day to day writing life, and incorporating writing into our vacations.

On our 40th episode of Dear Writer, we take a look at the process of self-publishing, and explain what that's looked like for us so far. We discuss the pros and cons of self publishing, and our experience as newcomers to the trade.

Our talking shop episode this week gifted us with another of Ashley's mini-lectures, where she explained a useful article she read on the young adult dystopian genre: A Creative Exploration and Analysis of Contemporary Dystopian Fiction. Munira Ezzi. Writing in Practice. Volume 4, 2018. Sarah, meanwhile, was struggling to find time. So, in an effort to find a useful resource to discuss, she headed...