By Sarah Hamaker, CCWF President Why should writers, aspiring or established, attend a conference for writers? I’ve attended small writers conferences and large ones, local ones and ones across the country, and each time, I’ve left glad I came. Here are my top 5 reasons for why writers should attend a conference for writers. 1….
By Sarah Hamaker. CCWF president As writers, we work with tension all the time—without tension, our stories would sag and our heroes and heroines would have very boring relationships. But this blog is about the tension we experience between what we want to work on and what we have to work on. For many of…
By Sarah Hamaker, CCWF president Have you heard the news about the death of words? Every few weeks or so, a story pops up in my Facebook feed about how people aren’t reading like they used to, how texting is obliterating writing, and how the Generation Z will kill off books. But I don’t believe…
By Sarah Hamaker, CCWF president I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately in relation to writing, and how we can forget to cultivate hope in our quest for publication, sales, and reaching readers. When our hope buckets are empty or nearly so, we find ourselves fighting discouragement, resentment, envy, and jealousy. We lose our…
The idea comes to you in a flash of brilliance. The plot, the setting, the characters all jumble together like a kaleidoscope of words just waiting to be brought into focus by you. You eagerly sit down in front of the computer, fingers poised over the keyboard and a fresh, blank document open on the…
By Sarah Hamaker, CCWF president Who wants to be ordinary? If I asked that question at a writers conference, I doubt anyone would raise their hand. For some reason, ordinary has become associated with dull, listless, uninteresting and uninspiring. As writers, we may be content to live ordinary lives, but we want our writing to…
By Sarah Hamaker, CCWF president I’m a details person, which translated well into my chosen profession of writer and editor. I notice things like misplaced commas, wrong usage of apostrophes (don’t get me started on how years can’t be possessive!) and subject/verb disagreement. It used to drive me crazy when I encountered grammatical or word…
By Sarah Hamaker, CCWF president Remember that old Nickelodeon TV awards show for kids where someone got slime poured over his head? That image of the green, gooey stuff cascading out of a giant bucket onto someone’s head came to mind when I read a snarky online comment about me. The person knew nothing about…
