It’s called a theme

Red and green are traditional Christmas colours, and they’re my favourite. I’m not sure why I bother to experiment with others, because eventually I always come back to some variation of red and green. For a few years we had two trees. One always had a random collection of family heirloom ornaments hung alongside homemade ones and whatever

Can writing fiction change reality?

. Anger hurts. Anger reacts and retaliates. Anger consumes like fire among tinder. Anger rages in so many parts of our world. Wars and political uprisings, invasions, murder and brutality spill from one country to another and onto our own city streets. An ostrich approach is tempting except we know anger won’t disappear just because

Getting In the Mood

Candlelight and soft music? I don’t think so! Then again, if I were writing in the Romance genre perhaps those are exactly the props I’d use to get into a scene-writing mood. When it comes to finding story ideas we all have our distinctive sources. For me, a single image repeatedly appears in my mind,

Lying My Way to an Award

Fiction writing is all about creating stories out of nothing. No, on second thought, that’s not entirely true. It’s about creating stories that evolve from a seed of reality… some small truth that evokes an idea, a possibility, that the writer’s brain can’t wait to develop into a plot. Recently Joylene Butler nominated me for

Is it Outlining or Plotting?

Sometimes I get hung up on semantics. “Plotting versus pantsing” is a popular topic of discussion among writers.  Writing by the seat of my pants got me through my first two novels, and with a germ of an idea in mind it’s how I write most of my articles. During revisions of my second novel

Whose Story Is It Anyway?

Authors get asked all the time about the source of their ideas and there’s never a simple explanation. A fragment of conversation, a fleeting glimpse of the unconventional, an unexpected sequence of events, and suddenly the writer’s mind is asking, “What if…?”   The idea won’t be original. There are basic themes that have regularly

Imagination at Work

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] Imagination is a fascinating phenomenon. With it the writer’s mind creates people who don’t exist, places that have never been, events that didn’t happen, and somehow combines them to create a world that readers accept as real.   Indulging in