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.
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.
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.”
Creative writing is rife with symbols. Symbols such as the sun as truth and owls as wisdom permeate every type of writing from novels to video games.
Twenty-some years ago, during the first wave of dot-com hysteria, I worked as content director at an audio-and-music startup called Audiocafe.com, on Mission Street in San Francisco.
Back in the 20th century, I used to record myself reading chapters of a fellow college student’s textbooks, as he was blind. At the time, unless someone was sitting with him reading the textbook out loud, his only option to hear the text was to listen to a tape. Sure, Braille was also an option, though I’m guessing most of his textbooks may not have been available in Braille.
Each genre of writing has a timeframe, its temporal setting—for news, product reviews, press releases, and nearly all corporate writing; the timeframe is the present. Anything else—celebrity profiles, short stories, screenplays and stage plays, novels—can have any sort of timeframe you wish. A story about a Civil War soldier can be told in the present tense, as if it’s a thriller...
