What will your motto be for 2023? #justwrite #iamwriting #iamawriter
Category: Just Write
270 Park Avenue
Memorable writing that sparks imagination. Lean in. Hear the writer’s voice on the page. 270 Park Avenue By Karen Handyside Ely 270 Park Avenue Crowed sidewalk. Manhattan energy. Staccato heels slap on the pavement. Collars pulled high to shield numb earlobes. Heads down, eyes forward. We are missiles on a mission as the flinty sky threatens snow. A teeming line of ants, racing the storm. No exit ramps on Park, just a continuous flow of determined arrows. All in a hurry to beat the flurry. Up ahead, one woman stops Creating a ripple, a log jam, startling the herd. Bending down, she speaks in warm puffs to the man shivering on the curb. They exchange words, unheard but plainly visible. Breath bubbles above their heads. She hands him her coffee still steaming in her to-go cup, and walks on. Movement begins anew, ever forward, but smiles appear on New York…
Taste of Summer . . . Prompt #679
A Taste of Summer is inspired by Ellen Wu and her beautiful plating and photography. Ellen describes this gorgeous dish: Greek Yogurt with Summer Fruits Greek yogurt, figs, strawberries, cherries, gooseberries, raspberries, blueberries. Chopped pistachios, freeze-dried strawberries. Raspberry coulis (with Chambord) Peach coulis (with Peche liqueur) “The afternoon lighting turned its yellow color to green.” Prompt: Taste of Summer
World Building With Words
“Readers seek the experience of the world through character emotion and consciousness. What we remember about books and movies is the way they made us feel/experience, which is why we crave another story-hit, more, more, more.” — Juneta Key, “A Look at World Building and the Reader Experience” Juneta elaborates: Use your character’s emotional attachment to places, things, and feeling of home–longing, or contentment, or discontentment. World building is an external and internal journey with the character. World building includes using all the senses, to create atmosphere, texture, and attachment: Sight, Smell, Touch, Hearing, Taste, and 6th sense. STORY EXAMPLE: Anne of Green Gables L. M. Montgomery uses the senses and emotions in such a way that her world is a character in itself. Read the free Project Gutenberg ebook. Chapter 1: First paragraph: “MRS. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with…
Don’t Rush It
“Don’t Rush It” by Morgan Baker I don’t like being late – to classes I teach or the airport to catch a plane. My anxiety meter goes haywire if I haven’t given myself the time to organize before school or when I’m packing to go away. Will I need my swimsuit? What about those shoes? I allow extra time wherever I go, which means I’m usually early. My stepfather once told my daughter as he drove her to a summer job, “You’re on time if you’re ten minutes early.” I’ve taken that to heart. When my daughter and I went to a wedding in Montana a few years ago, we were excited about the event, and to see the big sky landscape we had heard so much about. I didn’t want to feel rushed or anxious, so I allowed for plenty of extra time to get through security and find our gate….
Push Past The Fluff
When you are freewriting and there is more time to write, but you feel ready to stop . . . try to keep going. Push the limits. Push past the urge to go no farther. After the fluff is written, deeper writing can happen. Perhaps a doorway to intuitive writing will open. One of the benefits of writing fine details when freewriting, besides exploration and discovering forgotten items, is that details are what make stories interesting and make them come alive. I Feel StatementsThe reason for “I feel” statements in freewrites is that this is a way to learn and access your emotions about what happened. This is what personal essay or memoir writing is all about. The facts are interesting, but what the reader wants to know is: ~ What the narrator gained ~ The narrator’s emotions ~ What lesson was learned ~ The epiphany or the “aha” moment…
Write About Your Loss
Write About Your Loss By Ninette Hartley “Well, he has a broken leg but that’s the least of his problems. He has suffered some trauma to his head. In this country we . . . how can I put it? . . . we would say he is brain dead.” On the 13th of January 2011 my twenty-seven-year-old son Thomas was rushed to intensive care in Porto, having fallen through a skylight whilst searching for somewhere to paint graffiti. I received a phone call from a doctor in the hospital, and when I asked her how bad it was she explained his injuries to me. Her English was good, but I couldn’t quite take it in. His step-father and I had to get from Italy (where we lived at the time) to Portugal as quickly as we could. The hospital was waiting impatiently for me, his next of kin, to…
Layering
Layering: The goal of layering in writing is to take unrelated elements and bring them together in a single piece of writing. “Layering means that we’re weaving in different elements of our story, characters, writing craft, etc. Some writers even start with just one element—such as writing their whole story just as dialogue—and then layer in everything else once they have the shape of the story.” — Jami Gold Ideas to add layering in your writing. Start with lists: List #1: Some facts about yourself or your fictional character List#2: Favorite food or music List #3: Favorite movies or TV shows List #4: Philosophical sayings List #5: A type of clothing or furniture Freewrite: #1: Using a word or phrase from each of the lists, spend a few minutes creating a piece of writing. Freewrite #2, Layering: Add an outside event as a metaphor to echo the theme of your freewrite….
Writer Wounds and Scar Tissue
By Rebecca Evans We tell stories. But before we tell them, we hold them, think them, sometimes, we thank them. We recall and carry and live with them in our bodies. We embody them. Sometimes, they embody us. Some of our stories are built from sandbox and rhyme-singing childhoods. Others, built from bullies beneath the monkey bars. Many are the stories told to us, about us, some true, though most are not. And still others, the most difficult ones, are born from experiences. Someone one asked how long it took to write my memoir. 55 years. Yes. All of my years, because I lived through the experiences first. The truth is that we don’t just live through our experiences. We also don’t “get through” or “get over” the tough stuff—grief, loss, trauma. They live in us. If we’re lucky and wield pens, we push them out and onto the page….
Becoming a Writer in the Third Chapter of Life
Guest Post by Carole Duff All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. —Anatole France Western culture divides life into three stages: birth/student, work/family, and retirement/death. My husband and I, moving into our retirement years and building a new house, borrowed the Hindu concept of four stages, adding a time of spiritual growth and reconnection between retirement and death. The third stage of life, Vanaprastha, the name we chose for our mountain home, means retreat to the forest. Not retirement but time to learn, reflect, and grow. Time to take the internal journey and heal past wounds from loss, rejection, and inexplicable disruptions. Time to explore, discover, seek meaning, share wisdom, and serve others. Time to become our truer selves. As it turned out, I became a writer….