path of the storyteller / blog

I’m getting a wee jump on the holiday weekend. The first Wood family gathering in a long time has been planned in honor of my uncle’s 90th birthday. Flying on a plane will be involved! It’s all very exciting and heartfelt. 

So instead of my usual weekly livestream, I offer you a nice old-fashioned blog post. My inspiration? This quote, which I shared with the Storytellers’ Circle* membership last week. I think you’ll like it as much as they did:

“The best thing for disturbances of the spirit is to learn. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love and lose your moneys to a monster, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what...

Writing happens inside the skull of the writer, which makes it hard to observe!

We can be inspired by the finished work of our idols, but we never get to actually watch them do the thing that we ourselves are so earnestly trying to learn to do.

The process remains a mystery, and so developing writers inevitably wonder: Am I doing this right? Is it supposed to take so long and be so hard? How much revision is “normal?” And so on.

This week I talk about the writing process: what’s realistic, common pitfalls, and how to make your process the best it can be. 

My weekly livestream happens on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog.

To watch live and ask questions, you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.

And subscribe to the YouTube channel here. 

Everybody’s talking about Hemingway this week.

Well, maybe not everybody. But many of us who think deeply about writing have the new three-part PBS documentary about the life and work of influential 20th century American novelist, Ernest Hemingway, on the watch list.

Hemingway started out as a newspaperman, and his voice as a short story writer and novelist was noted for its punchy minimalism.

That makes this a good week to talk about brevity. Compression. The art of leaving stuff out.

Many writers know that “cutting” is part of revision, but it’s not always easy to know what to cut. Let’s discuss.

My weekly livestream happens on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog.

To watch live and ask questions, you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.

And subscribe to the YouTube channel here. 

This week’s livestream unzips the age-old question: Is it okay to write by the seat of one’s pants?

To be, in a word, a Pantser?

Or does the golden road to “real” writing require the dreaded Outline? 

Pantsers and outliners, outliners and pantsers.... why can’t we all just get along? 

I love this question and have OPINIONS. Is it even necessary to choose? What if we are all both Pantsers and Outliners — just not at the same time?

Many thanks to Path of the Storyteller follower Mailli for sending in this excellent question! 

My weekly livestream is on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and ask questions! Or catch the replays here on the blog.

To watch live, you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.

And subscribe to the YouTube channel here.

Think back twelve months and tell me the truth: Did your writing practice make the progress in 2020 that you promised yourself it would? 

The correct answer? I don’t care and neither should you. We can give 2020 a pass. You know what impact this year had on you. It was different for each of us, but if you’re reading this, YOU WON. You're here. You made it. I'm sending you a virtual hug. 

Now, a new year is upon us. There’s a whiff of hope in the air. And what we’ve been through does not alter the fact that many of us are all too familiar with the feeling of setting writing goals that do not fully come to pass.

Are we undisciplined? Unrealistic? Un-whatever your personal demon is?

The answer may be less mysterious, and less personal, than all that. In this livestream I serve up some goal-setting realness for 2021. No more writing goals that get buried in “life got...

[live broadcast starts at about 1:00. Feel free to zip to it by dragging the little dot on the video playbar!]

We writers tend to have a love-hate relationship with revision. We can fall down a deep rabbit hole of tinkering with our draft to the point where it turns into procrastination — or we judge ourselves harshly for writing drafts that are imperfect to begin with.

This livestream dives deep into why revision is so necessary and so challenging. Some takeaways: 

• where the secret wish to "get it right the first time" comes from
• why significant revision is inevitable
• how lucky we are to be writers, not sculptors!

In the follow-up questions, we talk further about the unrealistic beliefs that trip us up. Lots to ponder here! 

Remember: I’ll be broadcasting live on Facebook and YouTube every Wednesday at 1 PM Pacific. Tune in for frank talk about writing. If you can show up live, you can ask questions, too.  Links...