Congratulations to my writing mentor Julia Alvarez.
By Annalisa Parent www.annalisaparent.com Congratulations to one of the best writing mentors I’ve had the honor of working with, Julia Alvarez on receiving the National Medal of Arts this week.
on writing
The rules of writing are nothing like the rules of real life.
By Annalisa Parent www.annalisaparent.com The rules of writing are nothing like the rules of real life. In real life we censor ourselves, leave out the gory or embarrassing or overly personal details of the stories we tell about our daily lives. In writing, we have to be so brutally honest about the human emotional reality … [Read more…]
Saturday Syntax Sass: An Author’s Pet Peeves
By Annalisa Parent www.annalisaparent.com In one of my writing lives, I write sassy columns about dating life. Today I’m here to sass about grammar. Every writer has her pet projects, her grammar or syntax particularities, and her pet peeves. For example, one of mine is agreement. How many of you would have written “Every writer has … [Read more…]
The Importance of Musicality in Prose
By Annalisa Parent www.annalisaparent.com In one of the chapters of my life, I lived in Paris. My French boyfriend, like most twenty-year-old men, was an aspiring rock musician. I recall one day working with him on song writing; I was encouraging him to write the music to sound like the feeling of the lyrics he’d written. … [Read more…]
Another article featured on a dating site.
I just received a notification that TheNeeds.com is featuring my series on soul mates! Thank you, TheNeeds.com
Digging yourself out of a writing slump
Unslumping yourself by just daring to write something Some days I feel inspirationless—or worse, I feel discouraged—that my writing isn’t good enough, or I haven’t got anything to say, or that no one wants to read what I write. And, well, that feels awful. But I’ve found that the way through it is writing. It’s … [Read more…]
Sitting at the feet of those who wrote before us
One of the great things about living in a digital world is the ability to communicate with a wide variety of people. I had the great honor of a recent online conversation with Alexander McCall Smith author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, The Sunday Philosophy Club, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is … [Read more…]
Writing, Writing, Writing. And then some more writing.
In my other (non-writing) life, I am a photographer. In the early years of my training, a wise, experienced photographer said “The key to my success is taking lots of pictures, because you generally throw away at least half,” or something like that. And it is true, in photography, that photos are rejected because someone … [Read more…]
Studying Journalism
I studied journalism at the University of Missouri– Columbia. Here I am in the summer of 2011 with some of my classmates.
Write with me
Life is short, and so am I. You’ll hear this quip from me often. I believe that life should be lived to the fullest and with passion. For me, that has always meant, as the Greek poet Horace so aptly stated “Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: It’s good to be silly at … [Read more…]