Author: Krista Tibbs

Krista Tibbs studied neuroscience at MIT. She once had a job that involved transplanting pig cells into live human brains. She had another job that gave her clearance to the White House. Her books, The Neurology of Angels and Reflections and Tails, are mostly not about those things. Learn more about Krista from her blog, and her Amazon author page.

Show Don’t Tell [Insert Scream Here]

I think the overall feedback “show don’t tell” is about as productive as a coach standing at the side of a pool and yelling, “Swim better! Go faster!”

However, every cliché started out as simple brilliance, so instead of dismissing the catch-all comment in frustration, I started a list of what people really mean, such as:

– Don’t tell me how she felt; make me feel it.
– Don’t tell me how she seemed; make me see it.
– Don’t tell me what she knew; help me figure it out.
– Don’t tell me what she is; show me what she does. Continue reading “Show Don’t Tell [Insert Scream Here]”

Writing Outside Your Culture

I am essentially color blind, having grown up in northern Maine where 98% of people glow in the dark, then going to college with a class so varied there was no majority racial or ethnic group. There are advantages and disadvantages to this or any blindness. One advantage is a sharpening of other senses, which in the case of color blindness is an unobstructed view of a person on the inside. My idea of diversity is in thought and experience, and when I associate two people, the association is for similar values or competencies or intrinsic traits, things people can share as much or more with someone halfway across the world than with a look-alike next door. In writing, when I have to imagine the physical traits of my characters, they end up as varied in skin color and facial features as the people I know, which sometimes I forget to describe on the page, because their race doesn’t define their role in the story–no more than the mere facts of green eyes or brown hair. Continue reading “Writing Outside Your Culture”

It Shouldn’t Be Taking This Long

WHAT is taking so long?

Two years ago, my aunt sewed me a quilt by hand for Christmas. She made me promise to use it and not just display it, so on cold nights, I crawl under it and am warmed by thoughts of the many, many evenings she spent piecing it together, how she designed it especially for me with geometric patterns and materials in my favorite colors and subtle outlines of kittens and puppies that can only be seen if you’re close enough to wrap up in it.

In our circle of writers, we talk a lot about writing as a job that needs discipline and deadlines, and we judge our dedication by the number of words produced in a week. Commitments like these are necessary to keep moving ahead toward a goal (or an income), but I think it’s important to remember that writing is also art. Even though art can often be functional and beautifully mass-produced on a schedule, it also has an element of elusiveness. There are stories that flow naturally from your soul, come together on their own, and feel perfect exactly the way they hit the page–so much so that you wonder if someone else wrote them. But there are also stories that get rewritten and cut up and dropped on the floor, only to be recovered and reorganized and reset until they end up as close to your heart as a hand-stitched quilt. Continue reading “It Shouldn’t Be Taking This Long”

Sooo Phisticated

Photo copyright Stuart Miles
via freedigitalphotos.net

In October 2009, I received my first one-star review. The rating didn’t bother me much, because the reviewer’s other one-star reads included two of my favorite books plus an Oprah club pick. But a particular line in the text of the review haunted me for nearly three years: “The writing was so unsophisticated.”

After I read that line, it hardly registered when other strangers described my book with words like “compelling”, “important”, “heart-wrenching”, and “superbly written”, because my brain kept going back to so unsophisticated. I had never in my life strived to be sophisticated–I’m not even sure what it means–but suddenly it became the measure by which I judged every passage I wrote. Continue reading “Sooo Phisticated”