Karen Douglass, Author

Karen Douglass, Author: Prose & Poetry

Category: Uncategorized

  • Know What You Write

    You’ve heard the advice, “Write what you know”? Dull stuff if you don’t know much. I turned that around last week by visiting Providence, RI, in which I have set the novel I’m struggling to write. I went there, parked the rental car, walked the sidewalks, had coffee, visited a book store and bought a…

  • Map That Story

    Bill Roorbach’s craft book Writing Life Stories recommends mapping a once-familiar neighborhood in order to spark memories. That works very well. On Friday, over breakfast, a writer friend and I talked about a memoir project she has going and thinking about the streets where she and her brother played cranked up her imagination and focused her point of view.…

  • A Writer’s Prayer

    Whether you pray to an old man in the sky, a saintly woman in blue, a statue, or a light pole, it won’t hurt to think about praying like this: May I be well enough to get to my writing place; May I be safe from the critics in my head; May I know the…

  • Makeup for TV

    Writing is not, I repeat not, a solitary process. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I hang out with a lot of other writers, many of them I meet over coffee or in critiques or for free writing. I love these personal and up close meetings, especially in our high-tech world were too often we…

  • My Three Suns

    Last week I confessed my intermittent fear of writing. Today I want to tell you how I combat that fear, should you want to know. Three writers/teachers help keep me sane when  despair sidelines me. One is Julia Cameron, as I’ve mentioned before, especially her book The Right to Write. My daily habit of morning pages comes from Julia.…