Why a Sensitivity Reader?
Your cast of characters in any story is likely to be diverse, which means most of those characters won't be like you. In a circumstance where you write characters that have a different race, ethnicity, sex, gender, abilities, or even world view from yourself, it's good to run that by someone who embodies those traits.
You might have a project in mind but aren’t sure how to begin. Maybe you don’t have a project on the table but feel the urge to write. Either way, you can put word banks to use.
"When they think of huge openings, many people think of me" So says Hedwig, the transsexual East German rock star in John Cameron Mitchell's wonderful redemption story Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Gary Evan’s SOL is a deep-dive into the history of the Detroit Lions like no other. He has written an utterly unique account of the unlucky team and the city they represent and seem to reflect directly.
Almost all music fans have heard the classic love song "I Only Have Eyes For You." Its title and refrain both leverage "only" the way it's typically used in conversational English, even though its placement in the sentence renders a meaning that is probably not what the songwriter intended.
Liminality is the state between what was and what has not yet come to pass. It gets its name from the Latin word “limen,” meaning “threshold.” Although it was a prominent trope in medieval literature, world literature describes a similar power in this state of transition.
It’s quite likely that you’ll have the opportunity to review movies and plays in your writing career. The two story-telling art forms are as closely related as first cousins and have influenced each other since the days of silent film
The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan is often overlooked. But when your primary competitor is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, aka the best-selling series of all time, is there really anyone to blame? Most middle-grade readers had their sights set exclusively on the Harry Potter series in the early 2000s.
There’s no shortage of articles that recommend people watching to supplement your writing routine. Just going out and watching is a good start, but you can take the practice much farther to improve your writing.
Like rodents getting into seemingly impenetrable buildings, colloquialisms have a way of sneaking into many pieces of otherwise respectable writing. Among the most common is the phrase “try and . . .” as in “Try and start the car” or “Try and win the game.”
