art

Of Rooks, Guardians of the Threshold and Boundaries…

The chess piece or character known as The Rook, which is also called The Castle or as I like to say, The Tower can move as many spaces along a row or column on the chessboard.

The Rooks (each player has 2) combined with The Queen, form the major chess pieces. In this way they operate like Guardians of the Threshold preventing the opposing player’s pieces from gaining or capturing a player’s King.

Guardians of the Threshold in a novel hold the boundaries between the protagonist and her or his goal.

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African Bushmen, God, and Reality in Writing…

There is a Dream dreaming us.

–African Bushman

(The Mystic Vision–Daily Encounters with the Divine, Compiled by Andrew Harvey and Anne Baring)
How often do I create characters, work with them in uncovering their stories and personalities as I put write them on the page only to then meet a person who within seconds I recognize as one of my characters in a novel?

Very.

Of course these people have most often been around since long before I wrote or even conceived of the story to my novel, and its characters. I have not breathed them into life. And yet a connection exists between what we write and the life around us.

Let’s say for instance that the people I meet who remind me of characters I have created or who have emerged in my stories, have risen in some sense, from my novels.



What would that mean, that we as writers create characters whom we will then encounter in the physical form of human individuals through engagements and interactions and life?

And let’s say these people do not know, have no understanding or awareness that we are their creator.

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Faith, Our Personal Best and the Work We Do…

But I want to stay with mothers, because so often when we write we, and the world, does not take seriously what we do seriously, particularly if we choose to operate primarily as a mother, and a writer second.

Those of us who choose to place our writing second do so because I think on some level we know that we will never reach our personal best at crafting stories until we have nurtured our children to an adequate point in their and our lives.

This is not the only way to come to writing. This is our way.

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The Screenwriter and the Fiction Writer

Screenwriters hold a wealth of knowledge that benefits the fiction writer. Screenwriter and playwright, Kendall Williams who runs Morningside Writers’ Group sees himself as a dramatist-teacher. Along with facilitating fiction writers and memoirists to learn the basics of story telling–character, plot, point of view, dialogue, setting, and theme, Kendall also teaches workshop participants how to

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The Need to Keep Things the Same: Monica Ali and “In The Kitchen”

…Ali has taken the action out of the home and into the high-octane kitchen of the executive chef Gabriel Lightfoot, whose restaurant at the Imperial Hotel gives her a wider, more public space in which to continue her exploration of the modern immigrant experience. In changing her setting, she almost manages to change her tone,

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