Author: Gary McLaren

This author has written 143 articles

Writing Haiku

This is a guest post by Alistair Scott

Haiku are modest little poems. You are not going to make your reputation or fortune with them. But, don't dismiss them as something school kids write. They have other benefits. Composing haiku is excellent practice in close observation, clear thinking and tight writing - all essential skills for the good writer.

Traditionally haiku are three-line poems, the first and last lines containing 5 syllables, and the middle line with 7. There is no need for rhyme or punctuation, and some of the more minimalist 'haijin' (haiku writers) even consider a title superfluous. Furthermore, this traditional 5-7-5 form is no longer considered sacrosanct. So, what could be more easy than writing haiku?

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Learning from the Masters

This is a guest post by Laura Backes, Write4Kids.com - The Children's Writing SuperSite.

I love my job. I get to spend entire days in the children's section of the book store and call it research. I also get to celebrate birthdays of people I've never met. We recently marked Maurice Sendak's 75th birthday, and the 40th birthday of his most famous child, Max from Where the Wild Things Are. So I took the opportunity to reacquaint myself with some of Sendak's impressive body of work, and to meet Brundibar, his newest picture book, written by Tony Kushner and based on a Czech opera of the same name.

Whether illustrating someone else's words or his own texts, Sendak could never be accused of taking the easy route to publication. His books are complicated, deeply emotional stories, with subtexts that often illuminate the dark side of human nature. In an interview appearing in the November/ December 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, Sendak says "...we can get away with things in children's books that nobody in the adult world ever can because the assumption is that the audience is too innocent to pick it up. And in truth they're the only audience that does pick it up."

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What a Ghostwriter Does, and Why

This is a guest post by Andrew Crofts.

There are several questions which regularly follow the conversational revelation that I am a ghost writer.

'Why on earth do you want to do that?' is usually the first puzzled response.

'Don't you resent someone else getting all the glory?' is the next, and 'So what famous people have you done?' nearly always gets an outing before the listener's curiosity on the subject is finally sated and one can move on to asking them about their lives, (a much more comfortable conversational position for any writer). (more…)

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Tighter Market, Tighter Message

This is a guest post by Peter Bowerman, author of The Well-Fed Writer.

Gloom. Doom. Dark prognostications. Gathering clouds. The end of prosperity as we know it. Wooooo. You can't pick up a newspaper or flip on the news these days without hearing the latest evidence of the "slowing economy," "the economic downturn," the "national reversal of fortune." Yeah, whatever.

In the past few months, I've received a small flood of e-mails asking me about the viability of starting a freelance commercial writing business in these changing economic times. I can just picture the furrowed brows and chewed-up nails as they type away. So whether you're a struggling commercial freelancer or pondering the leap, read on… (more…)

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