The Goodjelly Blog
By Christine Carron
When I turned forty, which was not long after I officially started my writerly journey, I decided it was time to do something with all the diaries and journals I kept since I was ten. There were boxes of them. Over the years, I dragged those boxes from city to city; I even...
By Christine Carron
In 2010, I got to attend Tightrope! A three-day workshop led by Philippe Petit. Yes, the same Philippe Petit who walked between the World Trade Center Towers in 1974. There were five of us in the class. No hiding in the back. I was getting on the wire. Slightly...
By Christine Carron
When I started as a writer, I set two intentions:
- Write well.
- Write to delight.
It took a couple of years for me to realize that the way I was defining writing well was messing with my ability to write to delight.
Writing to delight was all about creating a rollicking good...
By Christine Carron
One of the best ways to move your writing forward is to get it critiqued. Yet receiving feedback is a tricky business. Studies have shown that our bodies respond to feedback, especially critical feedback, as a threat. That kicks off a range of internal reactions—think...
By Christine Carron
Imagine the following:
Reaction of the other group members: Horrified.
...
By Christine Carron
Two summers in college, I worked at a summer camp for girls in Grand Isle, Vermont. New campers arrived every two weeks. When they got down to the dance cabin, the campers were surprised that I expected them to dance. Evidently, the previous dance counselor let them pick up...
By Christine Carron
On the writing journey, one of two things is going to happen.
Option #1: You’re going to be one of those magical unicorn writers who has an idea, gets the novel written and revised by the end of the following week, sends it to your dream agent the next day, gets...
By Christine Carron
When I was seven’ish, my grandparents brought me to a bingo event crowded with mostly old people. Though, to a seven-year-old, anyone not easily identifiable as kid age is old. So who knows for sure? Luckily, historical accuracy on that particular point is not...
By Christine Carron
Patience is the last of the five Goodjelly Moves, completing the circle of skills that help you ace the writing adventure. Here’s the tricky bit: You cannot do patient. You just are (or are not) patient. A truth that got me thinking about tulips.
In November,...
By Christine Carron
Grace is the fourth of the five Goodjelly Moves. I love all the Moves, but I do have a special fondness for Grace. Mainly because when I was testing out the concept of The Moves with early readers, most of the comments I received were about Grace. They wanted Grace to be a...
By Christine Carron
Process is the third of the five core Goodjelly Moves. I’m a process improvement consultant by trade, so there was pretty much no way the Moves wouldn’t contain Process in one form or another. That bias aside, I comfortably assert that Process—loosely...
By Christine Carron
One of the core Goodjelly Moves is Power. Writing a novel takes serious solitude fortitude. Day after day, it’s just you, the page, and the story waiting for you to get its glory translated into sentences, scenes, and chapters. But, of course, solitude is only part...
