Learning Patience

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  It’s interesting how God works. My picture book, Lexie’s Adventure in Kenya: Love is Patient, teaches children to be patient, and I’ve needed a lot of patience lately. For all of you who need a bit of encouragement as you learn patience now or in the future, here are a few inspiring quotes that may help. God’s not finished with any of us yet! “God’s way of answering the Christian’s prayer for more patience, experience, hope, and love often is to put him into the furnace of affliction.” Richard Cecil. Yup, I think surgery might be my furnace at…

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Tension And Conflict Part I

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Welcome to CAN’s new website from Gail Gaymer Martin. Today I will begin a new series on Tension and Confict which is a driving force in fiction writing. I hope you enjoy the seven articles on this topic. The Set Up to Tension and Conflict I recently presented a workshop on tension and conflict. The topic offers many steps to writing a good novel. I began this workshop with the basic elements needed to begin a novel because it sets up how conflict begins. Conflict is a concept you know is vital to any story. It is what drives your…

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Ways To Help Readers Connect

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Welcome to the Friday CAN post this December from Gail Gaymer Martin at www.gailgaymermartin.com. I always happy to share information for writers on techniques of writing, especially writing fiction. Readers are important so knowing how to help them connect to what you write is important. I hope this post will provide you with techniques and ideas that work. Readers love stories that mean something to them. They may never experience the same event or problem, but they’ve had similar experiences or fears that those things might happen to them. It’s through the emotion authors bring to the characters that makes…

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Walk-On and Secondary Characters

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Welcome to the CAN blog and some information about writing fiction from Gail Gaymer Martin at www.gailgaymermartin.com Most writers learn how to create believeable main characters who are usual the man or woman bringing the story to life through their perceptions, emotions and actions, but learning how to use secondary characters is a different process altogether. Numerous characters appear in your novels for realism and to provide a piece of action necessary to move the story forward or to broaden characterization of a main character. These walk-on characters might be referred to as the waiter, clerk, cab driver, mail carrier,…

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You – Well, Not Really!

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I’m a hang-gliding fashion model who moonlights as a rodeo rookie whose brood of 10 adopted children are perfect angels… Not! But in my dreams… Maureen Pratt, here, with my CAN blog for July. And, in keeping with themes of summer fun and expanding our horizons, I thought I’d pen a few ideas about how to use our alter egos in crafting more active, compelling characters. We authors hear much about "writing what you know," and "putting ourselves" into our books, stories, and non-fiction work. There is great truth about doing this – we can strike very real chords of…

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Help! Where’s my story?!

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  Hello, again! Maureen Pratt here with my monthly CAN blog about the art and craft of writing. This month’s topic is, “Help! Where’s my story?!” or, “What to do when your story goes one way while you go another.” Whether we write fiction or non-fiction, plotting or outlining is often an essential part of the publication process. From the first query to the last book cover blurb, most of us try to envision the beginning, middle and end of a work before we dive in. But, as we authors know, as hard as we might work on those early…

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Finding and Writing a Character’s Voice: Lessons from Playwriting

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     Hello, again! Maureen Pratt here with my monthly blogpost about the craft of writing. Today, I'm going to focus on techniques to employ to find and write distinctive voices for each of your characters or individuals in fiction or non-fiction.     I began my professional writing career as a playwright, earning my Master of Fine Arts in Theater Arts with a concentration in playwriting from UCLA and later having a number of plays produced. Unlike writing for the movies, playwriting "runs" on dialogue. A professional script for live theater contains very little, if any, description except to set the scene, and…

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Story Part II: Where To Begin

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 Hi from Gail Gaymer Martin at www.gailmartin@aol.com While you read this, I am in Germany on tour singing with a Christian chorale. I love Germany so this is a special treat for me. And though I’m there, I didn’t want to leave out the next  part of the Story Series which I’m providing for writers and readers alike. Story is taking an idea and bringing it to life by transporting the reader from one world to another through the experiences of a character on a mission striving to reach a goal with a purpose. It captures the reader along with the characters so…

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