Category: Articles and Essays
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Writing and Egolessness
Crafting stories is the perfect opportunity, offers a wonderful experience, to practice egolessness. The words our characters speak, our prose that describes their actions and feelings are but soldiers in the army of our thoughts. How fleeting.
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Spiritual Awakening: Every Story is a Journey
Good stories and novels thrive on conflict and tension. All are headed for a climax, an arc, the mountain top experience of transformation. And yet the writer must travel in the opposite direction, deep within her or himself, to cull out the true meaning that supports and belies the words and actions of our protagonist…
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War, and Standing “In the Shadow of Suribachi”
Ever wondered what war is like for those who survive the physical batter and yet lay shattered beneath the psychological impairments of their battle? And what about the family members unable to fit the pieces together and create a lifeline of continuity for their loved ones who returned confused, bereaved and mournful at the loss…
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Making Soup
Screenwriter, and Creative Writing teacher of Morningside Writers, Kendall Williams, likens crafting stories and novels to setting about to make soup. We discussed the two processes in our a today’s special segment of Book Talk, Creativity and Family Matters, Savory Writing: Character and Plot. Two essential ingredients to a savory and aromatic story or novel…
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Inhabiting Your Character: Journeying to the Ends of the Earth
Crafting a novel requires a major character with whom the author is willing to spend at least the next year. Much of the time spent with that character requires inhabiting her or his skin, living inside their situation that we have created. As writers we expend a significant part of the energy of our imagination…
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The Aquarium of the Writing Group
Creative writing teacher Kendall Williams sees Morningside Writers’ Group as an aquarium where participants can embrace their vulnerabilities. Anyone who has ever tended and aquarium, particularly salt water aquariums, knows how delicate their atmosphere and the tedium required in maintaining a safe balance of salt to water along with other factors to ensure longevity of…
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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…