Category: Story
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The F Words: Following the F Words
It stands to reason that, before I sat down to write a YA novel titled The F Words — in which a teen who tags his high school wall with the F word is required to write two poems a week, each about a word that starts with the letter F — I would make […]
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The F Words: The Power Of F
On November 5, 2022, I will be one of several presenters at the Plainfield (Illinois) Public Library’s day-long event for writers, running from 10:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. You can read about the individual events, and register for them, by clicking here. As you can see, my presentation is titled The Power of F Words. […]
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My Writing Life: 5
The first year or two that I began to freelance as a writer, I looked for all kinds of writing and editing work (hence the refrigeration manual I blogged about earlier). Eventually, however, I gravitated toward writing mainly educational materials for grades K through 12, as I may have explained in a previous blog. In […]
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My Writing Life: 2
After that initial short story I wrote in high school, my next foray into fiction came about fifteen years later, when I decided to start writing novels. I had plenty of plots in mind and just needed to decide which one to start with. At the time I was working as a typesetter for the […]
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The F Words: Minor Characters
I often enjoy minor characters in literature, and as a writer I thoroughly enjoy creating minor characters. In literature minor characters play a variety of roles. One of their major roles, of course, is to help move the plot forward. If they weren’t there, then the major characters would have no interaction with anybody but […]
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My Writing Life: 1
It’s interesting for me to consider where my writing life began. An image from my very early years comes to me: I’m holding a blue crayon and I’m “writing” all across the pages of a picture book. By the time I got to first grade I realized that was not the way to treat a […]
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The F Words: Symbols
Although I love literature and am avidly interested in many different parts of a story and the way a story works (as you can probably tell from reading my blogs about The F Words), I have, I confess, never been much interested in symbols in literature. In fact [embarrassing], I can sometimes read a novel […]
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The F Words: Dialogue
Most readers love dialogue, probably because it reveals something happening in “real time.” That is, the action is on the page, rather than being relayed by a narrator as having happened. Dialogue isn’t “having happened,” it’s happening. Right now, as the reader sees the words. Also, I suspect that some readers (I’m one of them) […]
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The F Words: Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing can be delicious, as in anticipating a birthday present. Or it can be terrifying, as in anticipating a hurricane. In literature foreshadowing works to indicate or warn the reader that something may happen. It’s never as exact as the date of a birthday, nor as specific as “Hurricane winds exceed 160 mph.” And […]
Barbara Gregorich 