While I’m in France, teaching writing, sitting by the Mediterranean, eating good cheese and bread, and drinking lots of wine, I’m offering either a collection of writing prompts, story starters, or exercises each week. Today I have a couple of writing exercises for you. I hope you will use them to jump-start your writing! Sometimes […]
While I’m in France, teaching writing, sitting by the Mediterranean, eating good cheese and bread, and drinking lots of wine, I’m offering either a collection of writing prompts, story starters, or exercises each week. This week, I have suggestions on how to use lists in your writing. Please do make me happy and write while […]
Every night after dinner, I do a little work and then by 8 PM you'll find me cozied up on the couch beneath my favorite quilt, ready to watch the Olympics. The Winter Olympics are my absolute favorite, so I've been in heaven since they started last week. These athletes inspire me. Ski jumpers, […]
I'm reading two books about writing at the moment, and together they are making my head explode. In a good way. It's exploding with ideas. The first one is called Wonderbook, and it is by Jeff Vandermeer. I'm only at the very beginning of this baby, having just gotten hold of it last week. This […]
I am a terribly fickle person. Most often, this fickleness applies to activities. Like cooking, for instance. I'll go on a kick where I'm interested in cooking. I buy cookbooks, I look up recipes, I watch the Food Network, I actually cook meals and occasionally even bake things. Then it all falls apart. My interest […]
This is a book review for which I did not receive compensation, but did receive a free copy of the book. "I would go as far as and I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When […]
How we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives. Annie Dillard So, I'm working on the rewrite of my novel. And one of the things I am attempting to do is deepen the secondary characters. To do this, of course, I must first deepen my understanding of them. Easy, right? Well, […]
Writers can always benefit by going back to the basics, right? Or not? And more to the point, if you've been writing for awhile, have you tried going back to the basics recently? It is not that easy. Going back to the basics seems like a good idea. You get the desire to strip it […]
Yesterday, I wrote about the fabulous workshop that Darnell Arnoult gave for the Loft and talked about how she presented an exercise called "Finding Fiction in a Photo," wherein we looked at pictures (amazingly enough) for a full five minutes and then wrote about them. I can't express how important this kind of deep connection […]
I promised a run-down of the recent orientation weekend my partner Terry Price and I put together for the Writer's Loft, at MTSU in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Terry and I took over the program last March, (geez, it seems much longer ago than that) and so this was the first orientation on our watch. We were […]
