The Goodjelly Blog
By Christine Carron
One by one, I pulled out the carefully wrapped wooden figures from the nativity set I bought at a Christmas market in Germany years ago. As I was unwrapping Joseph, a neighbor walked past our apartment door with his dog. My pup decided to notify me of that momentous event. Her a...
By Christine Carron
When you go to a writing conference or workshop, if you are anything like me, you want positive change to happen as a result of your attendance. Not only because it’s an investment of your time and money, but also because you are committed to growing as a writer. Perhaps though,...
By Christine Carron
I should be devastated. After a discussion with my first readers, it became clear that the revision I had been working on for ten months did not work.Â
I am not devastated. I am relieved. Clarity is a beautiful thing. No matter how difficult the truth.
Once you have clarity, y...
By Christine Carron
I love jigsaw puzzles. Last night, I finished a particularly tricky one. My puzzle speed slowed dramatically toward the end as I sorted out the last fifty pieces or so, which all looked very similar. I got it done through a combination of methodical analysis, leaps of intuition,...
By Christine Carron
The other day I watched a special episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee from 2015 where Jerry Seinfeld visits with then President Obama in the White House. In the second half of the interview, after Seinfeld cheekily points out that he’s made way more money than Mr. Obama,...
By Christine Carron
Sometimes I order books and they sit unread for years. Others I inhale immediately. How to Become an Extreme Action Hero by Elizabeth Streb was an inhaler.Â
Before proceeding, let’s be clear. I am not an extreme action hero. I once took a boot camp style exercise class, where t...
By Christine Carron
Many years ago, I attended a session on revision during Grubstreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace conference led by Ann Hood. A tip I learned in that session remains one of the most practical writing tips I’ve ever received. It was all about what causes flat chapters (and sce...
By Christine Carron
Like old-school record albums, there are two sides to the writing adventure: the A-side and the B-side. The A-side, the Artistic side, is the work we writers do to craft a story that we hope will gobsmack our readers. Often, the A-side is the juice, the special sauce, the holy-w...
By Christine Carron
I once delivered a speech on the benefits of growing up with a mentally ill father. A main benefit I highlighted was that it spurred a lifelong curiosity about balance, health, and healing. I was (and am) a learning maven, churning through any idea for how it might help me (and ...
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 go...
 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 required for this...
By Christine CarronÂ
One of the core Goodjelly moves is creating Possibility. You can create Possibility in the context of your entire writing adventure or in your writing itself. In this post, we are zooming in on the writing, to the details of description itself and the possibilities that come fo...
