June Gould, Ph.D.
Short Guide to Good Poems

1.    Poetry is more than just arranging words. Poetry is an art that details human experience through emotion, and thought into a selection of form

2.    Writing poetry allows you to explore deep feelings and observations

3.    Poetry turns language into a powerful force for expressing the inexpressible

4. At its heart, poetry is about observation and reflection

5. Imagery and metaphor are essential to good poetry

6. Learning how to write poetry is being vulnerable with yourself or with an audience

7. For beginners or seasoned poets, the key to writing poetry is to stay true to your voice. You can play with English, French or Japanese forms, but in the long run, your words must find their own form, their own self-discovery, their own creative expression

8. Writing poetry promotes questioning

9. Writing may be permanent in a book, letter or computer 10. Writing poetry refines your ideas.

MARGARET LUCKE:
Eight Tips for Writing Great Fiction

Margaret Lucke is an author, editor, and teacher of writing classes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes tales of love, ghosts, and murder, sometimes all three in one book. She is the author of four mystery and suspense novels, numerous short stories, and books on the craft of fiction. Visit her and join her mailing list at https://margaretlucke.com/

Here are a few of the things that teaching has taught me about writing great fiction. 

 1. Great characters are the basis of great fiction. Who the story is about is more important than what the story is about. Readers crave characters they can believe in, relate to, and root for, and they’ll remember great characters long after plot details fade. This is true even of villains, the ones that readers love to hate.

 2. A great story describes a journey that changes someone. A story sends your protagonist from Point A—what her life is like as the story opens—to Point B, the place where she arrives as a result of what occurs along the way. Whether the journey is geographical, emotional, or psychological in nature, nothing afterward will be quite the same as before. This journey defines what is sometimes called the character arc.

 3. A great plot makes characters struggle with conflicts as they try to achieve their goals. What sets your character on the journey? Something happens that presents a problem, a challenge, or an opportunity. If she solves the problem, meets the challenge, or takes advantage of the opportunity, she can achieve an important goal or attain a cherished desire. But roadblocks, complications, and persons with opposing goals stand in the way. At its most basic, a story is this: A character tries to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. Conflict lies at the heart of any great story.

 4. Great fiction provides readers with an emotional experience in a vivid story world. More than just setting, the story world is the physical, cultural, and emotional environment in which the narrative takes place. A well-told story brings the readers inside a fully realized story world and makes their experience there rich and satisfying. When readers’ emotions are engaged and they feel like they’re right there in the middle of things—that’s when they can’t put the story down.  

 5. Every great story is a suspense story. No story can succeed without suspense—the artful tension the author sets up between the readers’ hopes and fears, between their concern for the characters and their uncertainty about what lies ahead. Make your readers care, raise questions they want answers to, and make them wait to learn the answers. That way you’ll keep them turning the pages to discover how it will all turn out.

 6. Great fiction is told from a clear and distinct POV. Point of view, or POV, is the vantage point from which your readers observe and participate in the story events—whose eyes they look through, whose heart and mind they occupy, whose experience they share. The many options can be daunting—first person or third, distant or deep, multiple or single. Handling POV with confidence, care, and consistency can turn an ordinary story into a great one.

 7.  Great fiction is told with a powerful narrative voice. Voice is an elusive quality, hard to define. It comes from the way you combine ideas, language, and your singular perspectives to create a dramatic effect or elicit the desired response from the reader. Voice is what gives your story its music and personality and makes your writing sound like you.

8.  There is no great writing, there is only great rewriting. The purpose of the first draft is to discover what the story is. The purpose of the second and subsequent drafts is to figure out how to tell it as effectively as possible. Those later drafts give you the chance to fix plot issues, bring your characters more fully to life, explore your themes more deeply, and make every word count.