The Writing Path Blog

Your Protagonist’s Thought Patterns

By Rachel Dacus | October 6, 2015November 9, 2017 by Rachel Dacus

Emotion is important in fiction, but thought and will are also a huge component of character and character development. You can identify with a character’s thoughts and decisions when she’s under stress. One of life’s pleasurable but stressful activities is travel. Since my novel’s main character is on a three-week, intensive tour of Renaissance Italy, stress is a given. May Gold combats it through her Gratitude Practice. I gave May this habit of enumerating things…

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I’ll reading from my book Gods of Water and Air

By Rachel Dacus | October 4, 2015November 9, 2017 by Rachel Dacus

Next Sunday, October 11, at 3 pm in picturesque Crockett, California, I’ll be a featured reader at the Valona Deli Second Sunday Poetry Series. Coordinator Connie Post kindly invited me. If you’re in the SF Bay Area and can make it, it would be wonderful to see you! There’s an open mic after the two featured readers, and a terrific jazz ensemble plays at 6 pm after the poetry. Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and…

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Why You Need to Read This Now!

By Rachel Dacus | October 1, 2015 by Rachel Dacus

A great title gets us reading with a good title as a good first line. Or maybe just as hard — first lines also bear the full weight of the reader’s entry — and have at times despaired over that blank space where the title should go. When I wrote my article The Challenge of the Title, published by Avatar Review, essays on creating titles have proliferated, along with the need for titles because of…

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Writing My Character’s Future Life

By Rachel Dacus | September 14, 2015 by Rachel Dacus

Photo: Nadya Phillips, Venice 2015 In writing a novel or story a writer gives lots of thought to what happened to the main character before she or he arrived at the beginning of the tale, but have we considered where she goes after the ending? If you’re contemplating a sequel or a series, it’s a natural question. But how to begin to answer? J.K. Rowling planned not only her characters’ arcs, but their futures beyond…

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Poetry’s Monetary Value

By Rachel Dacus | September 5, 2015 by Rachel Dacus

Can writing poetry ever pay enough? And do we need it to? For those of us taking advantage of the fall season to submit work to recently opened journals, there’s a new way to see if any on your target list pay for poems. Most print journal do pay, but only in copies. For online published poems, my stipend is merely the exposure to readers. But why not get at least a monetary token of…

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For the Birds

By Rachel Dacus | August 23, 2015 by Rachel Dacus

“Hope is the thing with feathers” led me in an interesting direction: a series of poems with birds in them. Inspired in part by Emily Dickinson’s interest in birds and her many bird poems–which I found collected in a book called A Spicing of Birds –I wrote a series to decipher the messages I hear in the silver clamor of morning and evening birdsong. One poem, “Year Year I First Heard Birdsong”, found its way…

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Bernini the Mage and Master of Space

By Rachel Dacus | August 15, 2015April 25, 2018 by Rachel Dacus

I thought of Bernini as a mage and master — a magician and a master of sculpture — long before I saw the title of the article. As I worked on my novel, The Renaissance Club I studied the great Gianlorenzo Bernini and his works. Bernini plays a leading role in my story, along with a young art historian who worships the 17th century artist. I looked at many still images and videos of his work,…

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My Poem in Anthology MEASURE FOR MEASURE

By Rachel Dacus | August 7, 2015 by Rachel Dacus

I’m absolutely thrilled to have my poem “Sapphics with Little Rags and Cabbage” appear in the new anthology edited by Annie Finch and Alexandra Oliver, Measure for Measure. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015, the collection is a wonderful way to study the fine points of meter through examples. Annie and Alexandra have organized it by metrical type and added notes on the different meter, which should make it a great way to learn…

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Magical Realism in Poetry & Pattiann Rogers’ Cat

By Rachel Dacus | August 6, 2015November 27, 2018 by Rachel Dacus

What is magical realism in poetry? Possibly it’s defined by what isn’t magical realism in a poem. One might ask what is magical realism in fiction, but in poetry, in a poem, it’s what both is and isn’t. It’s the magical field created around ordinary images with ordinary language. The establishing of an entire field outside of, and at the same time, inside what we call reality. A great example of a magical realism poem…

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The Poetry of Magical Realism

By Rachel Dacus | July 29, 2015June 16, 2021 by Rachel Dacus

The Poetry of Magical Where things just happen. The blue-beaked parrot lands on the hummingbird feeder that dangles from your ear and begins singing like Pharrell Williams— a voice that drops veils of gauze