“Brilliance in a bottle”

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Hello! And a very Merry Christmas to you! Maureen Pratt here for my monthly blog which, this year, just happens to fall a couple of days after one of my favorite holidays – you guessed it – Christmas! What I especially love about Christmas is that we get to bring out many of our dearly-held traditions. Whether it’s in baking, decorating, music, or Scripture study “what was old is new again” as we celebrate the Season. How does this relate to writing? Well, it reminds me that sometimes I miss “old” traditions of the authorial kind. Writing long-hand, for example,…

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The Power of Positive Prose

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  Hello! Maureen Pratt, back again, for my monthly CAN Blog post. I’m very happy to be blogging today about the craft of writing and, specifically, the huge difference "writing positive prose" can make in describing characters, painting pictures, and conveying the heart of a story, be it fiction or non-fiction. What do I mean by "positive?" Given two possible ways of writing the same sentence, the more positive can be the strongest one to choose. Consider this description: "Amy didn’t necessarily think she was beautiful, but she couldn’t believe that the casting director put her in secondary roles that…

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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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