Category: Craft of Writing
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From Superstition Review
Lynn Sloan: Patty, I’ve enjoyed and admired your work for years, so it’s a real treat to have a chance to ask you about your writing and your new story collection, Responsible Adults. Great title. It’s the title of one of your stories, but what it suggests, a bad situation where a sound, responsible adult is…
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On the Board of Directors of the Society of Midland Authors
In May 2019, I was elected to the Board of Directors of the Society of Midland Authors to serve a three-year term. The Midland Authors was founded in 2015 to create “a closer association among writers of the Middle West” and to stimulate “creative literary effort.” I’m honored to a part of this institution that…
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I Interview Julie Justicz for Fiction Writers Review
I met Julie around ten years ago when we were in residence at the Ragdale Foundation. We were both staying in the historic, beautiful but drafty, main house during a snowy stretch. Julie had a private bath, but I had a room with good heat. Over cups of tea in the kitchen we discovered we…
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How to Read a Photograph: A Workshop for Writers
On Saturday, August 17, 2019 I will lead the workshop on How to Read a Photograph at Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, Chicago. Writers collect and use photographs as records of facts and as inspiration. Getting it at a glance—that’s what we like about photographs. They are simple; they yield their information without a struggle; their language…
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Panel Discussion on Short Story Writing
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Q & A with author Jan English Leary
Begin With Curiosity: Q & A with Lynn Sloan Posted on March 21, 2018 by BLOOM by Jan English Leary Lynn Sloan and I have known each other for more than twenty years, first as members of writing workshops, and lately in a small critique group. We have a rich, collaborative friendship, and we’ve also both been fortunate to have…
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Rub Two Sticks Together from The Writer’s Dig
How do you go about starting a story when your creative spark has dimmed? Try rubbing two ideas together, like Lynn Sloan did. By Lynn Sloan As every fiction writer knows, there comes a moment when the ideas dry up. It’s not that you have no ideas, it’s that none of them are engaging. You…
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March 03, 2018
Interviewed by Christine Rice For me, a brilliant piece of writing often shatters what I thought I knew, dumps it out – messy and unrecognizable – before rearranging the pieces in a way that shifts my perception. That perception might be nudged significantly or incrementally but after reading the last page, I almost always see…
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Essay published on Marylee MacDonald’s site for writers
by LYNN SLOAN, February 16, 2019 “So where do you get your story ideas?” My old friend’s question stumped me. Recently she had begun writing short stories based closely on her own experiences, and she’d just finished reading my story collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough. An army grunt in occupied German after World War II;…