Category: Story
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The F Words: The Fear of F
In an earlier blog I wrote about The Power of F. But now I want to write about a subject that strikes me as very sad: the fear of F. Back in 2020, after City of Light offered me a publishing contract for The F Words, my editor and I discussed the title. Our first…
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The F Words: Quoting Myself
Authors are often called upon to come up with quotes. This is especially true if somebody (a fellow author, an institution, a journal of some kind) wants a testimonial or a capsule summary of something. I have often given such quotes, which are usually pithy (50 words or so) statements about whatever the subject matter…
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The F Words: Framing Device
In literature, a framing device is a story that surrounds another story. That is, a novel begins with a story, and that story is interrupted by another story, told to completion. And after the inner story ends, the novel returns to the starting story and finishes that. Some examples of frame stories are Joseph Conrad’s…
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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…
Barbara Gregorich 