As many of you know, I’m about to fly off for a month on the east coast visiting family, friends and former classmates. Traveling, though, does something to my creativity, something unpleasant. I still write, can’t do without that, but I don’t often come up with much worth continuing. So–I heard about I-Search and assigned…

A blank page and a fast pen, early morning, no goal but to let the ink flow. I think about the nudge I felt last evening when I bit into a piece of dark chocolate, my unique teeth marks clearly sculpted. And that observation connected to my long-standing love of mystery stories. What if I…

Last weekend I wrote about fish hooks. This week I want to write about water. While I was in high school, I lived a short block from a cold, clear lake in Maine. I now live across the street from a small, shallow lake in Colorado. My son and his wife live across the road…

  Yesterday at Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop I heard a lively debate on the writing technique called the hook, the concept that the story/poem/essay/memoir has to pull the reader into the text by “setting the hook” in the reader’s attention the way a fisherman sets the hook in a nibbling fish, a quick and forceful move.…

Admit it–do you make lists and then ignore them? I do. Almost every morning as I do my morning pages, things pop into my head and I jot them down: travel plans, to-do things for the day/week/month, shopping lists, calls to make. I think there is an area in my cerebral cortex that specializes in…