Karen Douglass, Author

Karen Douglass, Author: Prose & Poetry

Tag: free advice on writing

  • Break Time, Brake Time

    By the time you read this I will have driven five hours north to visit friends in South Dakota. We’ve been waiting for all the omens to bode well and finally they do: nothing on the schedule for the next three days, good weather forecast, and the price of gas is down. All of which…

  • Writing Is a Business

    You see that title? Do you believe it? I do, I do, but I have not always acted on that belief. Well, this week I got fed up with the helter-skelter nature of my work and decided to do something about the practical side of life.  Not the writing side. I’m compulsive about that, as my regular…

  • Truffle Hounds & Writers

    An Italian truffle hound digs up only ripe truffles. Its nose is that fine tuned. I don’t claim to find only ripe, valuable details when I collect data. Sometimes I have no immediate use for a detail that catches my attention. Like knowing about truffle hounds. Turns out that they come from a long line…

  • 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…