My dear friend, Arlene Mandell, asked a question the other day that I’ve been pondering. What happens to our scraps of writing? What can we do with our journal writing and our freewrites? I just read “The Secret Life of a Teenage Author” by Amy Zhang in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers. Zhang’s honesty and confession led me to want to learn more about her. Her blog, “A Story of a Dreamer,” is inspiring and delightful. The October 10 post begins, “If You Give an Author Some Chocolate …to encourage her to revise, she’ll eat it. She’ll eat it slowly because there is an art to eating chocolate bars. She’ll try to revise while holding the chocolate bar in one hand, but realize that she can’t revise without proper music. If you let an author look for proper music, she’ll decide that her normal revising playlist simply…
Category: Just Write
Twelve Steps to Successful Writing
Are you the type of person who needs to clear your desk before getting down to the business of writing? Me, too. I have to pay the bills, sort, organize, stack things on my desk. Satisfied, but not ready to get to writing, I look around. Oh, I really need to do the laundry, clean the bathroom, clean the floor, check the refrigerator, look outside, get a drink of water. Sometimes it seems I’ll do everything except write. One year I participated in NaNoWriMo for the month of November. I loved it. This year I’m going to participate in Write Nonfiction in November (WNFIN), founded by Nina Amir. But I know I’ll only be successful if I plan ahead. Here are Twelve Steps to get to that writing we so want to do. 1. For the next two weeks, get caught up. Get organized, file those pieces of paper that…
Natalie Goldberg talks about writing practice
From an interview in The Sun with Natalie Goldberg, November 2003: A writing practice is simply picking up a pen — a fast-writing pen, preferably, since the mind is faster than the hand — and doing timed writing exercises. The idea is to keep your hand moving for, say, ten minutes, and don’t cross anything out, because that makes space for your inner editor to come in. You are free to write the worst junk in America. After all, when we get on the tennis courts, we don’t expect to be a champion the first day. Writing is an athletic activity; the more you practice, the better you get at it. The reason you keep your hand moving is because there’s often a conflict between the editor and the creator. The editor is always on our shoulder saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t write that. It’s not good.” When you keep the…
Fabulous character sketch – Elizabeth Berg
“My mother was dressed in her beautiful yellow summer robe, the tie cinched evenly into a bow at the exact center of her waist, but her auburn hair was sticking up in the back, an occasional occurrence that I always hated seeing, since in my mind it suggested a kind of incompetence. It was an unruly cowlick, nearly impossible to tame — I knew this, having an identical cowlick of my own — but I did not forgive its presence on my mother. It did not go with the rest of her looks: her deep blue eyes, her thin, sculptured nose, her high cheekbones, her white, white skin — all signs, I was certain, of some distant link to royalty.” — What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg
Gorgeous Writing by Melanie Thorne
I love gorgeous writing. Melanie Thorne‘s novel, Hand Me Down is rich with gorgeous writing. People magazine calls it “Compelling.” From San Jose Mercury News: “Hand Me Down, which recalls the gritty power of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, is fiction with the ring of truth.” Here’s a sample of what we’re talking about: “As I watch the night sketch ghostly shapes in the darkness, a draft sweeps through the room, into my cramped chest, and plants a seed of ice deep inside.” “She’s warm and she holds me longer than Mom had in the rain, and I stand there frozen, squeezing my eyes tight against her shoulder. She smells like clean stream water and a hint of lavender and I inhale that freshness in the first deep breath I’ve taken in weeks.” If you ever have a chance to hear Melanie speak, or take a class from her…