Lily Iona MacKenzie's Blog for Writers & Readers

The Ripening
The Ripening:
A Canadian Girl Grows Up

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" Tillie’s grit and ability to face life’s challenges are inspiring, the seeds for later discovering her artist self. Tillie takes readers on a wild ride. Join her if you dare! "

Lily Iona MacKenzie Books
Curva Peligrosa
Curva Peligrosa

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

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FLING!
Fling!

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

"Fling! is both hilarious and touching. Every page is a surprise, and the characters! I especially loved Bubbles, one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read."

Lily Iona MacKenzie Books
Freefall
Freefall :
A Divine Comedy

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" These fascinating characters will fill your imagination, defying expectations about aging, art, and what truly matters in life. "

Lily Iona MacKenzie Books
All This
All This

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" Indicative of the title, the poems in All This range from the conventional lyric/narrative that captures an intense moment of emotion, an epiphany glimpsed briefly out of the corner of the eye, to the more experimental. "

Lily Iona MacKenzie Books
No More Kings
No More Kings

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "

Each finely crafted poem in this powerful collection comes alive on the page while she traces the days’ journeys with a painter’s eye, a musician’s ear, and the deft pen of a poet.

Lily Iona MacKenzie Books
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Do Writers Really Need a GPS?

Photography-the-Netherlands-e1516363586897.jpegI have a love/hate relationship with my GPS. On the one hand, I appreciate being able to input an address and magically have this robotic voice guide me to my destination, assuming it knows where to send me. But I also miss the hands-on experience of studying a map and finding my own route, one that makes sense to me and is visually verifiable. When I’m being directed by my GPS, I’m totally in the hands of the GPS gods, and I lose the fun of making my own plan.

You may be asking, but what does this have to do with writing? Isn’t this a blog for readers and writers?

Yes. And that’s why I chose this topic.

It occurred to me recently that when writers follows an outline, when they know in advance where their story is going, they are using a kind of writer’s GPS. It may get them to a destination, but they’ll miss out on a lot in the process. Instead of getting lost at times and stumbling into scenarios they had’t anticipated or letting the characters and situations guide them on this narrative journey, they rely on a plan that can eliminate the kind of surprises and interaction at the heart and soul of stories.

Okay, so I’m making a parallel between using a GPS and writing, and I’ve already extolled the virtues of maps that I can hold and peruse. You may be wondering what the difference is between writing that follows a plan (GPS) and writing that uses a map instead. Isn’t it the same thing?

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that somewhere in the writer’s unconscious a plan does exist, but she hasn’t teased it out yet. The reason it isn’t the same thing is because the GPS takes control. It assumes it knows where to go just as a writer does who actively plots a story beforehand. With a map, there are many more possibilities. We know that there’s a path, but we have to use our senses and trust in the unconscious to help us find it. That requires depending more on intuition than on conscious plotting.

What kind of device do you depend on?

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