by Jackie Cangro | May 9, 2018 | Writing Craft
Deciding the best way to end a story is, for me, like filing my taxes. I know I need to do it, but I put it off and put it off until I just slap something together in a mad dash at the last minute. I don’t feel good about it, and I just hope no one notices how...
by Jackie Cangro | Apr 19, 2018 | Writing Craft
I was at a writing group recently when a fellow writer felt a few scenes in her novel were dragging. She was concerned readers would be bored. (The death knell for a novel!) The solution, she decided, was to create a bit of intrigue and drama. To do that, she is...
by Jackie Cangro | Apr 2, 2018 | Writing Craft
In a class I was teaching recently, a student asked me an unexpected question: How do I read more effectively? He told me he loved reading and he certainly had opinions about the books he read, but he didn’t know how to translate those opinions into a method to...
by Jackie Cangro | Nov 27, 2017 | Writing Craft
If you’ve been hanging around the writers’ water cooler for a bit, there’s no doubt you’ve heard the term “worldbuilding” followed by the names Rowling or Tolkien spoken in hushed, reverential tones. You may have wondered, “What is it? Do I need it? If so, how do I...
by Jackie Cangro | Nov 14, 2017 | Writing Craft
I’ve always thought screenwriters have it easy when writing descriptions. Creating a vivid setting in a movie is much quicker than on the page. On the screen, a ten-second pan of the camera gives the viewer everything she needs to know. This would take pages and...
by Jackie Cangro | Oct 10, 2017 | Writing Craft
Each October, the Van Cortlandt Manor, a few miles north of Manhattan, hosts the Great Pumpkin Blaze. We’ve never been able to get tickets—by the time we got around to thinking about autumn and Halloween, it was always sold out. This year we didn’t leave it to chance....
