Sara Donati's Blog

This image is adapted from Janet Burroway’s excellent Introduction to Fiction Writing. It encapsulates the essentials of well structured storytelling.

I kept this weblog for more than ten years, and this is the place to be if you are looking for information about writing fiction. There are  multiple discussions of technical and craft issues (point-of-view, narrative voice, how to write sex scenes — a perennial favorite, etc.) That’s also where you’ll find posts about my own storytelling process, how I have dealt with writer’s block (or failed to deal with it); my experiences with the business end of publishing and also a series of autobiograph...

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More than two years since I posted here, but I ran across this essay I wrote and decided it might be of interest. I did bring a couple things up to date.  And while you’re here, you could hop on over to the other weblogs. There’s a new one called Visual and Sweet Blue has been tweaked. 

 

The Education of a Storyteller: Slanted and Abbreviated

Rosina Lippi

revised October 2023

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What you need to know about me first and foremost is that I grew up in  a working class neighborhoo...

The  stranger asks:

 
The author answers:You’re a novelist? Have you published anything?>You’re a surgeon? Have you ever operated on anyone?Have you written anything I might have read?>Do you read novels?Um….>Then, no.Any bestsellers?>

I read a couple every year.

Still haven’t figured out the formula.

Literature or fiction?>Yes.Any of your novels made into movies?>Only in my nightmares.Who do you get compared to, as a writer?>

My brother com...

This weblog has been around for a long time. I no longer post to it regularly, but I haven’t taken it down because it still gets a lot of hits; that makes me think that some people find it useful. 

But it’s a big crazy monster of a weblog, and because it’s so big there are lots of bugs.  So I made a decision some time ago which I have been slowly implementing. Here’s the skinny:

This weblog stays put. All the posts about writing, craft, publishing, and related matters stay right here.

Everything...

This advertisement (found at the Library of Congress site) may look boring but I have been staring at it for an hour and now you can do the same.  It is in fact a cornucopia of information about travel in 1857. First consider:

If you want to travel by rail from Manhattan to St. Louis you will find not one or two but eleven possibilities. Chose the rail company you want to start with, which of four stations you prefer, and whether you want to set out at 6 a.m., 6 p.m., or sometime in between.

Of ...

It takes me a long time to write a novel. My readers wait  at least a couple years between books.  I’m hoping this short excerpt from the beginning of Little Birds will make the wait a little easier.

This novel serves as a bridge between the Wilderness series, which ended in 1824, and the Waverly Place series, which begins in 1883.  Little Birds is set in 1856-57, primarily in the western territories.  The central character is  Callie Ballentyne, one of the daughters of Lily Bonner and Simon Bal...

Conan Doyle ms. Sherlock Holmes: Is this not fun?

I thought I had lost these copies of letters and emails from readers, but stumbled across the file today.  This isnt all the correspondence, but a selection of notes that made me think or laugh or reminded me why I write.  Some of them go back twenty years, and I havent kept up this file (because I couldnt find it) for ten years or so.

Today I was also reminded that my filing routine is god awful. Important docs can show up in one of four...