Awhile back, at a writers’ conference, a young woman raised her hand during a panel and asked, “I just recently graduated from college and it’s hard for me to find time to write now. How can we be paid for our writing?”
One of the panelists made a noise that sounded like a cross between a bus door opening and a dog coughing. “No one is going to give you money to write,” they said. “I mean, get a job.”
Continue reading “Time To Write”
As far as I’m concerned, most kids are way smarter than adults.
Take Allie Webber. At the age of 6 she invented Robie the Robot, a robot doll made out of recycled materials. At 12, she invented cold-sensor gloves that let wearers know when their fingers were close to frost bite. Continue reading “Ask Dana: My 12-year-old daughter wants to take your 10-week Screenwriting I class. That’s okay, right?”
As we enter the lazy days of August, I’m going to (lazily) borrow some advice from two writers.
Ann Patchett recently published an essay in the Washington Post about how Snoopy influenced her as a writer. Not Snoopy’s actual writing, which wasn’t that stellar. (He began almost every story with: It was a dark and stormy night.) But Patchett drew inspiration from the bravado with which Snoopy approached writing, perched atop his doghouse with a typewriter, reminiscent of the bravado he displayed perched atop his doghouse as a World War I flying ace. Continue reading “Dog Day Advice”