Morning Words and Magic
In the early morning, the summer air is magnanimously cool. I rise before anyone else is awake. I sit on my little cushion, close my...
Anna Gates Ha
writer
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- 3 min
Learning to Meditate, Learning to Write a Novel
When I first picked up Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I was in a pretty bad place. I’d been a mom for about three years, and...
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- 3 min
Your Novel's Ground Situation: The Ultimate Plot Test
When writers talk about plot, the conversation tends to center upon inciting incident, rising action, and climax. But a novel’s ground...
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- 4 min
For Emotion- and Character-Based Writers: How to Get to the Plot?
For a very long time, when someone asked me what my novel was about, I became really anxious. It didn’t matter if I had two-hundred or...
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- 4 min
Creating Emotion on the Page with Oscillation
Like so many other writers, I fell in love with reading at a young age. There were many things that drew me to words, including my love...
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- 2 min
To a Writer, Whose Baby Will Not Sleep
Oh, mama. Things haven’t gone as you’ve planned, have they? It’s eleven o’clock at night, and your baby has been screaming for the last...
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- 3 min
The Power of Nonrestrictive Elements: An Emotional Guide to Grammar
I am, unequivocally, a sentence girl. I love the craft, the swing, of words that builds to create narration. Most of my experience with...
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- 3 min
Using Fear as an Editing Tool
From an evolutionary standpoint, fear is very useful. It was fear—increased heart rate, tense muscles—that allowed our ancestors to...
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- 4 min
On Presence & Writing
About a year ago, standing near the cold cut display, I met a woman who said she’d been to infinity and knew the meaning of life. She’d...