Colleen Rae's Writing Bio
Colleen wrote the Writer's Digest Book Club "classic," Movies in the Mind: How to Build a Short Story and was the founding editor and publisher of the Santa Fe Literary Review. A popular workshop leader and conference speaker for over a dozen years, she presented her innovative techniques to audiences around the country, including the Aspen Writer's Conference. When she lived in L.A., she taught in the UCLA Writers' Program. Colleen has written in every style, including a movie script, Zero Point; a nonfiction/memoir, Tales of a Reluctant Psychic; a novel, Perchance to Dream, and has won many awards for her essays, columns, articles & short fiction. Colleen did undergraduate work in psychology with a creativity studies emphasis and then went on to earn her master's in English Language and Literature with a creative writing speciality from the University of Chicago.
CREATIVITY ARTICLES
“Imaging,” Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, Summer 1985
"ONE SUMMER DAY, an old Spanish man walked into the small southwestern town library where I worked. He walked with a cane made of a polished and reinforced cactus skeleton – the oddest thing I’d ever seen. Stooping under the low, adobe-thickened entry way, the smell of his sunbaked sourness pierced the cool room. With each step toward me, his cane struck the flagstone with a pistol clap. His old penny colored eyes flashed in his corrugated face as he demanded with a soft-spoken, pure Spanish lisp a book on the Mexican War."
“The Creative Personality: How to Enhance Your Creative Potential,” Piedmont Airline’s Pace Magazine, June 1985
"CREATIVITY is the ability to originate, which is to bring things into being. An example of creativity is shown in the story of the German chemist Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, who is commonly referred to as, simply, Kekule. He had been working for some time on determining the structure of the benzene molecule. He was having little success until he dreamed one night of six snakes forming a circle by each biting the tail of the snake in front of it. Upon awakening, Kekule remembered his dream image, and he recognized that this image might be symbolizing the structure of the benzene molecule. As it turns out, benzene is a hexagonal ring structure with six carbon atoms arranged at the vertexes. It was Kekule’s dream that led him to his discovery."
WRITING HOW-TO ARTICLES
“The Writing Wheel,” College Teaching, Summer 1986Reprint of “Before the Outline—The Writing Wheel,” The Social Studies, July/August 1990 (ERIC NO -EJ415766: “ranked number 1 in the hitlist”)
"Outlining endures as a pre-writing technique because it helps some writers organize their thoughts. Unfortunately, too many college students prove daily that beginning with an outline does not insure unified writing. To help my students write more effectively, I developed a technique for writing from thesis statements that requires that students create a picture of a wheel. The hub of their wheel is a word or phrase that holds the essence of what the student is trying to say; the spokes are the concrete examples which will support the claim made in the thesis statement; and the tire is the thesis statement which allows the wheel to move."
“A Column Writer's Ten Commandments,” Southwest Writers Workshop Newsletter, October 1990
"How do letter writers, columnists and essayists turn their anger into (publishable) art? That's what students in my The Mighty Pen adult education class set out to discover. After analyzing their favorite columnists, they came to some conclusions. I took the liberty of turning their theories into canon:"
“An Editor’s Note: My Manifesto,” Southwest Writers Workshop Newsletter, February 1993
"It's time for a return to a literature of meaning - stories and poems that we can sink our teeth into, food that fuels our thoughts and sparks our conversations into the stuff of which salons are made."
“Tools for Creating Emotionally Powerful Fiction,” 1994 Writer’s Digest Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market
"Writing itself is not hard; it's shaping the product into a well-crafted form that creates panic in most of us. Through analyzing my own approach to fiction writing and through studying the methods of other authors, I've developed techniques that help turn creative expressions into polished and publishable forms. One that's particularly useful focuses on the main character's dilemma as it grows out of his or her need and out of what I call a Continuum Trait. At the base of this technique are five questions to ask of our character."
“Writing from the Inside Out: Letting Your Characters Tell Their Stories,” 1997 Writer’s Digest Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market
"One of the biggest mistakes we writers make is thinking that we have to write our own stories. That's what I call "writing from the outside," and it often leads to wooden pieces without any emotional pulse. But when you write from the inside out and let your characters tell their stories, it can produce such powerful work that it will leave you reeling."
“The Creative Power of Doing Nothing,” The Writer, July 1997
"Let's say you've been working on a story. It's coming, but it's not coming fast enough. What will speed things up? Surprisingly: Doing nothing. Now's the time to partner with your unconscious for a week and to let it do the work for you."
“The Secret to Writing Great Sex Scenes,” Writers’ Journal, January/February, 1998
"Even successful writers have trouble writing sex scenes. It's so daunting to some that they don't even try. But there's a secret to writing erotica."
PSI ARTICLES
“Is There a Sixth Sense?” Psychology Today, July/August 2000
"Alex, a university colleague, was cleaning his double-action, six-shot revolver in preparation for a bunting trip later in the month. In this pistol, when the trigger is pulled the hammer is cocked, the cylinder revolves, and the hammer falls on the next chamber, all in one smooth motion. For safety's sake, Alex normally kept five bullets in the revolver, with the hammer resting on the sixth, empty chamber."
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BOOKS BY COLLEEN RAE
MOVIES IN THE MIND:
HOW TO BUILD A SHORT STORY
Sherman Asher Publishing, 1996.
A featured "Classic" of the Writer's Digest Book Club.
This book is now out-of-print, but you can
buy it used from places such as
amazon.com
PERCHANCE TO DREAM
Haven Hill House, 1992.
"A unique voice telling a tale of reincarnation, love, and friends that's as magical as One Hundred Years of Solitude, as rollicking as Tom Jones, as whimsical as Don Quixote, and as wise as Jonathan Livingston Seagull."
"A celestial romp." Joan Mason
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Colleen Rae's ''Perchance to Dream''
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TALES OF A RELUCTANT PSYCHIC
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