Choices is pleased to host Dr. Brenda Shoshanna on her WOW! Women on Writing book tour of The Unshakeable Road to Love (Value Centered Relationships). Dr. Shoshanna has also honored us with a guest post about how to end loneliness. Here's Dr. Shoshanna: THE END OF LONELINESS by Brenda Shoshanna, Ph.d. Living as Strangers to Ourselves and Others So many of us live as strangers to ourselves and others, then we wonder why we feel so alone. Rather than communicate truly we hide our true thoughts, speak in riddles, give double messages and think we’ve had a conversation. But we haven’t. It is also rare to truly listen. Most of the time we pay most attention to our own thoughts and responses to what is being said. These kinds of conversations block out what is really being said. They create conflict, power struggles, disappointment, and we end up seeing ourselves as separate and … [Read more...]
Novel successes and woes
I've been glued to my chair working on my novel for months: writing new scenes, converting dialogue into inner monologues, changing tense from present to past, creating new chapters where three asterisks indicated breaks in the text, and generally editing as I went through it over and over again. A little bit about my new scenes* process: I marked up my manuscript to indicate where (with page number) a new scene was needed and what the scene should consist of. I highlighted that marker in yellow. I then copied the marker and pasted it in a new document called New Scenes. I created the new scenes in the New Scenes document without touching my original manuscript. When I finished creating the scenes I edited them several times to make them as mature as my original manuscript, already in its eighth draft. Then I merged the scenes into the manuscript, starting from the end of the book, so I wouldn't mess with the page numbers And as I copied and pasted the … [Read more...]
How my novel is progressing
I haven't written about my work on my novel for quite some time. So, I thought I'd bring you up to date. Yes, you're right. I'm still working on it after all these years about seven at least. However, I think I'm finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. After all, I'm working on draft number eight. A few months ago, I hired an editor to do an assessment critique, and after a thorough reading, he provided me with ten pages of single-spaced notes, with many rewriting assignments. Before I embarked on any of it I asked him to honestly tell me if I should put the book on a shelf and forget about it, or keep on working. He suggested I keep working, and that's what I'm been doing. For the last several weeks I've been working steadily to accomplish the editor's suggestions. And while I work on the novel, I totally ignore social media of every kind. That was hard at first, but it gets easier with time. The first thing I did was abide by the editor's suggestion to change … [Read more...]
Revisiting John Updike
It's a given that reading is just as important as writing or maybe even more so. I'm always reading something. In the last month I read the first two novels that John Updike wrote about Rabbit Angstrom (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux). My intent is to read some well-known and well-regarded books written by people of my generation. Philip Roth is on my list as well. I have no doubt I can learn a thing or two about novel-writing from these books. I won't get into a discussion of plot and characters here. I am more interested in Updike's writing style. The books are long. I bought old paperback editions and the typeface is so tiny I could barely get through five to ten pages at a sitting. Recently new novelists have been told to vary the length of their chapters and sentences and paragraphs and use a lot a dialogue instead of long narratives. Updike consistently breaks those rules. The two books I read had long, long chapters, paragraphs and sentences and little dialogue. … [Read more...]
