dawn.vogel | February 17, 2020
Writers are told to vary their sentence length to make their prose interesting, so that readers don’t fall into a rhythm or pattern with their reading. This article talks about the use of complex sentences to create compelling and emotional prose. There are a number of examples of famous writers who have done this, followed […]
dawn.vogel | February 3, 2020
Most people use plot or characters to make their stories go, but this article presents some other options for short story engines. It’s a very interesting read that gave me some ideas for potential future stories. It also includes some exercises for trying out some of these alternative engines, which is a fantastic place to […]
dawn.vogel | January 27, 2020
In one of the games I play, which is a sci-fi heist game, we’ve got a couple of characters who fancy themselves as fashion designers. I threw out the challenge that my character wanted a dress that mashes up Sarah’s dress from Labyrinth with rutilated quartz (as pictured here). I could envision exactly what I […]
dawn.vogel | January 20, 2020
I was recently talking with another author about book synopses and back of the book blurbs, and while I don’t have a lot of experience with the former (yet!), I have written a few blurbs for my books and helped others write theirs. This article give a good list of tips for writing a book […]
dawn.vogel | January 13, 2020
The glosa or glose is known as a Spanish form, though I haven’t been able to find any information about its origins other than it being a medieval Spanish form. The basic rules are simple: take a quatrain (four lines) from another poem, and use each of those lines as the final line in a […]
dawn.vogel | January 6, 2020
Last week, I talked about writing to a theme. This week, I’m talking about writing to prompts. The two things are related, but not entirely the same. Writing to prompts comes up frequently if you’re looking to challenge yourself to write a daily, weekly, or even monthly story, when you don’t necessarily have an end […]
dawn.vogel | December 30, 2019
I write a lot of stories that are prompted by themed calls for submissions. These are often for anthologies, but they are sometimes for a themed issue of a magazine or for a magazine with a very specific genre/aesthetic. I’ve had fairly good luck with placing my stories in themed anthologies, so today, I’m talking […]
dawn.vogel | December 23, 2019
The paradelle is one of my favorite forms of really ridiculous poetry. United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins made it up as a JOKE. But I latched onto it as an interesting and somewhat challenging form that I could logic my way through. And folks, I do love a challenge I can solve with logic! […]
dawn.vogel | December 16, 2019
It’s time for another question from the audience! How do you tighten up dialogue? How do you make dialogue that sounds right to a reader that’s not you? This is an interesting question for me, because I don’t know that I’m necessarily good at writing dialogue (and in fact, I wrote about not being great […]
dawn.vogel | December 9, 2019
If you’re shopping for a writer this holiday season, have you considered a fun stocking stuffer of ridiculous post-it notes? Not only are they fun, they’re also practical, because most authors I know swear by post-it notes of some sort to keep track of projects, plots, or even our mundane to-do lists. I personally have […]
