Tag: writers

No one is entitled to anything….

Okay, I’m stealing the snark queen crown from KS for a bit. Pardon my ranting….

Once upon a time I was the supervisor for a department of a retail computer electronics company which shall remain nameless. One day one of my employees – we’ll call him Dick – came to me in a bit of a snit. It seemed that another employee, John, wasn’t sharing his tools. Well, John was a great employee. In the Army Reserve at the time, he kept his work space neat and clean, his tools maintained and in place. As a consequence, he had the best tools in the department and he usually shared them. He had only one rule – return it the way you found it. Dick had broken that rule. Well, actually he’d broken the tool, and it wasn’t the first time. So John banned him from borrowing his tools. Dick, feeling he’d been treated unfairly, decided to help himself to John’s tools. At which point John went to him and politely asked for the tools back. Military trained, he used please, explained why Dick couldn’t use his tools, and then said thank you. I knew this, because as supervisor I’d been watching. Continue reading “No one is entitled to anything….”

Write What You Know?

How many times have we all heard that old saw “write what you know”? What does that even mean?
Many take this as advice to write only about our areas of expertise, what we have studied, where we have been. The implication is that if we are not well versed in our subject matter that we will slip up somehow and that our ignorance cannot help but be revealed.

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Ed’s Casual Friday: When good research goes bad

Today, I’ll be pushing the bounds of the “Casual” part of the column title, as this is more of a story than a post. However, it’s the sort of thing that often makes my fellow writers smile ruefully, while “regular people” look at me like I’m psychotic. So here we go.

Back in the mid ‘90’s, when flannel-clad Grunge bands roamed wild and free, I was an apple-cheeked (just go with it) student at a Midwestern university. I was studying Literature, with a Creative Writing emphasis, which of course means I was writing a lot of short stories. And reading a lot of short stories. And talking about a lot of short stories. But because nobody actually wants to grow up to be a short story writer (“I have a burning need to express myself through the written word…briefly.”), of course I was working on a novel. Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: When good research goes bad”

The IU Crew

A classy posseWho is in your crew? Who’s in your corner? I’m about to share with you one of the most important things I have ever learned about writing. You need a gang. You need a crew. You need people you can bounce ideas off of. You need people you can vent to. You need to have a group of people who’ve got your six. Why? There are lots of reasons, but the biggest one is that riffing with creative people makes you more creative.

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