Steve Ersinghaus

We know that dreams often act as a spike for writing and reflection. But we also know that dreams change over time. What changes about them is translatable into image. How does this work:
1. Given: change
2. Significance
As a person grows, the texture and subjects of dreams change. My own significant dreams are those that [...]

Another semester has closed. The narrative has found resolution. For me it’s always interesting the way things happen. Number one, students always surprise me. It’s always a mistake to judge early. “These students can’t write, read, or think their way out of a sitcom.” No, they typically can, if they do the work and take [...]

Susan Gibb writes
And, we played with paper. In the New Media class I was happy for days fiddling with the handed-out Mobius strip. In this class, we folded a plain piece of paper in such a way that corner flaps were created and various writing surfaces were then made available. The professor [...]

I’m still getting used to Wordpress and there are a couple of things that need working out before the Narratives weblog goes live in the new space. One of the nice features, one lacking in other systems, is the wp static page element which may work great as a place to upload and store fiction, [...]

Susan Gibb writes over at LtS
Two days of writing, ten pages of Absolutism, Peter the Great, Declarations of Independence, D of I’s for Men, D of I’s for Women, and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Will this knowledge help me in the twilight years? Has the lack of a clear understanding of the French Revolution hurt me in [...]

The folks did a great job at the writers conference yesterday. Susan Gibb gave an informative and professional peek into weblogs as writing tool. She went pretty deep, providing examples of the form, genre, and the pros of portfolio writing.
Mark Anastasio was smooth with comics; Jim Keating did fine with IF, although he needs [...]

Note that Sean Woolford’s weblog has been added to the list here. Sean is a student in Composition and has expressed interest in the weblog and I hope will be building his typepad space into a portfolio that doesn’t just contemplate the good and bad of college Composition but that also allows for tracing his [...]

Susan Gibb writes

Excellent writers group meeting tonight, and I’ll post more on it tomorrow. But one thing remains floating in my mind that I wanted to put down.
One of the workshopped pieces we felt needed a character buildup, fleshing out. While I said at the time that we need to sympathize with the [...]

Susan Gibb at her weblog creative writing journal asks a good question

I don’t know that I have ever gone back and added in so much, a good forty percent increase–and no doubt some will be cut out–and I wonder why the images don’t come with the first writing, why the story wasn’t clear as it [...]

The written synopsis of the film Mirrormask, which looks like a nice bit of eyechocolate, reads like this

MirrorMask centers on Helena, a 15 year old girl in a family of circus entertainers, who often wishes she could run off and join real life. After a fight with her parents about her future plans, her mother [...]

This American Life does a great job on the romance writing industry. It’s a good look into the business of writing this kind of fiction.

A commercial for the pill says “Be true to yourself.” This could mean when you feel like having sex go for it as long as you’re taking the correct medication. Or it may mean, don’t worry about the typical stuff and go with your gut, your intuition.
And as Microsoft and Mozilla rush to fix the [...]

A recent Fiction Writing session dealt with the idea of meaning in story, that is literary meaning in the context of craft discussion. The subject was “Deportation at Breakfast,” a story by Larry Fondation. I don’t think I discourage discussions of meaning in story but I do make a distinction between the analysis of craft, [...]

Stories are cool, stories are fine. In my family, my son sits rivetted while my wife makes up stories on the spot. Stories about pencils, shoes, and planets. She is the “provider” of story. And then “this” happened and the boy laughs and laughs then asks for more. “Tell me a story about the couch,” [...]

LTS writes of voice in fiction

Voice, I have found, is not necessarily a single entity assigned to a writer, but something that is uniquely his or hers to formulate into a recognizable perhaps, but multilingual style creation of a skilled writer. We all have several voices, most noticeably the contrast between our content self [...]