Anne Woodland

       It's interesting how life is constantly trying to teach you things if you let it, especially about yourself. In recent years I've discovered a lot about my inner workings. The most recent thing I've realized is that I am way too prone to independence.      To clarify, I do think some level of independence is a good thing, but it's also important to know when to ask for help or when to collaborate, and that is, apparently, a skill I do not possess. Some of that might be due to the fact that I was the second of seven children, so independence was quite a useful life skill growing up.  That being said, I do think most of my issue stems from the fact that in most situations asking for help literally does not occur to me. My instinct is to research and fixate until I figure it out or give up for an extended period of time, and while I do ask questions, I rarely explicitly ask for help. Also, on the odd occasions when it does occur to me to ask, ...

      One of the difficult things about writing, at least for me, is how much of myself I put into my characters. That's not to say that all my characters are the same, although undoubtedly they have some commonality. Rather my characters are expansions on aspects of myself. Or even a sort of experiment on an emotion that I experienced but didn't dwell on. They're "what ifs".  What if I had a different background? What if my temperament was completely different? What if I was someone else?     Now obviously, you have to build on the foundation of that "what if" concept and by the time you're finished you'll hopefully have a decent character. It's a rather interesting and often surprisingly introspective exercise in imagination. The dangerous part is how vulnerable it makes you feel.  Not only are your characters your brain children, they're reflections of yourself. You love them and you want other people to love them and see them as you d...

     I look at nature and I am amazed at how balanced it is.  The life cycles of the various food pyramids feed each other and keep each other in check. It speaks to me of perfect, omniscient creation. It's not until humans involve themselves, directly or not, that things frequently fall out of harmony. And I think that speaks to the reality that humans are something more than just animal.       We certainly have a great deal of commonality with animals. We share quite a bit of DNA. The basic components that create us are pretty consistent across the board, at least for vertebrates. We have most of the same organs in quite similar placement, same general large bones, although the specific layout varies a bit. We share a lot of basic brain chemistry and instincts. Humans are animals, but we aren't just animals.     Humans aren't just animals because no other animal has the ability to both create and destroy on the scale of magnitude that ...

      Good storytelling requires two things: firstly, you need the audience to be interested in the story you're telling. Secondly, you have to keep them interested. The particulars on how to do so vary a bit genre to genre.  However, one of the most effective ways to lose an audience's interest is to tell them things you aren't showing them.      What do I mean by that? Well, for example, say I'm watching a movie and five or ten minutes in the main character is described as "caring too much", but everything I've been shown about this character makes them seem flighty, immature, attention seeking, and a bit self-righteous. Now as an audience member, I'm immediately distrustful of anything I'm told going forward. Admittedly, Edger Allan Poe does an amazing job using the "tell something not shown" concept rather ironically in "Tell Tale Heart", so it is possible to tell a compelling narrative like that, but only if you're tryi...

    Hans Christian Andersen published a story in 1837 and this tale, like many of his other works became a well known fairy tale. A classic. Then in 1989 something happened.  Someone made a movie of this story. Sort of. It had the same name. It even shared a number of major plot points, but the ending...  Let's just say so many artistic liberties were taken that the original storyline was murdered, dismembered, and then reconstructed into something that bears a faint resemblance to what it once was, much like Frankenstein's monster.      I am speaking of The Little Mermaid .  So, what did Disney's plot salad get right? A number of things: the little mermaid being youngest daughter of the widowed sea king, a bunch of sisters, her fascination with the surface world, a prince having a birthday party on a ship that sailed into a storm, her rescuing him and leaving him on a beach, trading her ability to speak and sing to a sea witch for legs, the princ...

       After fiction, whether fantasy, scifi, or based in reality, my favorite genre to read is history. I particularly enjoy various pieces on different cultures and such as it helps me understand a great deal more about the world and why things are the way they are. I just finished a brilliant book by Ruth Goodman called The Domestic Revolution , which basically expounds on how the rapid shift from wood to coal burning in English homes dramatically altered not just every aspect of daily life, but also had major cultural implications that continue to the present.  It was so interesting to see how everything fit together. I'll give a brief overview that will in no way do justice to this lovely piece of research.  Fuel shortages and rising populations turned interest to the relatively cheap coal instead of traditional wood(this was around the reign of Elizabeth I) Wide-spread coal burning required chimneys in the common houses were previously there would gen...