The Write Spot to Jumpstart Your Writing: Discoveries, edited by Marlene Cullen Reading this anthology is like walking into a word bazaar, where the reader is called to taste grief’s shadows, to sample sweet memories. The reader is beckoned by the poetry of human existence, lured to the scents and sounds of places and times. Savor this visit to worlds familiar and unfamiliar. You will leave, feeling satisfied. — Claudia Larson has been published in Tiny Lights, The Write Spot, Searchlights & Signal Flares. Her writing is nourished by nature and her life on the prairies. Marlene Cullen has created a simple, concise format that will instantly inspire you in your own writing. Each collection of poems and short essays will carry you away to different times and places with a hidden gem at the end of every chapter where each author leaves you with “words of encouragement” to help you…
Fire Up The Reader’s Brain
“Once you are clear about how to choose your scenes, develop them to create ‘the dream’ of your memoir. The term ‘fictional dream’ comes from John Garner’s The Art of Fiction in which he writes that we weave a world for our readers with every detail we include —every scene, description, character and piece of dialogue. When we fail to offer continuous cues to scenes in that world, the reader falls out of the dream. The best way to create this dream is to write vivid scenes that stimulate the brain to see, feel and taste that world. Research in the neuroscience of writing demonstrates that when we read a story with sensual details, our brain fires up in the areas of visualization, taste and sound.” Excerpted from “You Must Remember This” by Linda Joy Myers, The Writer February 2016 Posts about using sensory detail in writing: Use Sensory Detail…
Does your memoir have a theme?
Should your memoir have a theme? Yes, according to Brooke Warner. “Your memoir has an atmosphere, the air a reader breathes, and it’s called theme. Its presence is felt in every scene, whether or not it’s explicitly named by the author.” —Brooke Warner, “Back to Port,” The Writers, February 2016 “If your theme is vague, such as transformation, try to articulate what initiated your transformation.” Warner gives the example of Wild by Cheryl Strayed and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, both about transformation while working through grief. Find your theme and tell your story. Read Brooke’s guest blog post, here on The Write Spot Blog: Why Keep Writing When No One Is Listening. Just Write!
CICADA is a YA lit/comics magazine and is . . .
CICADA is a YA lit/comics magazine and is fascinated with the lyric and strange and committed to work that speaks to teens’ truths. We publish poetry, realistic and genre fic, essay, and comics by adults and teens. (We are also inordinately fond of Viking jokes.) Our readers are smart and curious; submissions are invited but not required to engage young adult themes. Especially welcome: works by people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQAI+ folks, genderqueer folks, and other marginalized peoples. Not welcome: cultural appropriation. Fav writers, YA and otherwise: Sarah McCarry, Nnedi Okorafor, Sherman Alexie, David Levithan, Daniel Jose Older, Holly Black, Kelly Link, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ntozake Shange, Anne Carson, Jacqueline Woodson, ZZ Packer, Angela Nissel, Sofia Samatar, Malory Ortberg, Saeed Jones, Octavia Butler, Andrea Gibson. “There’s room in the world for your dark weird truths.” Associate editor Anna Neher on what Cicada wants. The above is excerpted from Cicada’s Submission Guidelines….
Rewrite “What I Did This Summer” . . . Prompt #336
Today’s writing prompt is excerpted from Everyday Creative Writing, Panning For Gold in the Kitchen Sink by Michael C. Smith and Suzanne Greenberg. Ben Johnson, a seventeenth-century English writer and scholar, characterized poetry as “What has been oft thought but ne’r so well expressed.” In so saying, Johnson relieves poets of the obligation of coming up with new ideas and focuses on the perhaps infinite number of ways that ideas can be expressed. To illustrate this idea, consider that most of us were required to write a “What I Did This Summer” essay at some point in our school careers. While the subject matter for these essays is largely the same among classmates – camp, swimming pools, summer jobs – the ways in which we wrote our stories those details we chose to highlight and those we chose to omit, are what gave each piece its own flavor and originality. For…
How to catch the ideas that flit by.
Today’s Guest Blogger post is from one of my favorite authors, Rachael Herron. Rachael writes: A comment by David Sedaris on a podcast gave me an a-ha moment recently, and I wanted to share it with you. I’d always wondered how he got his essays so brilliantly specific—filled with the kind of particulars that put you right into the spot where he stands. From Me Talk Pretty One Day, “For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it…
What Got Taken Away From You? Prompt #335
The following is from I Could Do Anything If I only knew what it was, by Barbara Sher. Once someone I cared for deeply did something very unethical, so I tried to totally revise my feelings about him. “He’s not a good person,” I said. “I don’t know how to love him anymore.” And a very wise woman told me, “Your love belongs to you. You mustn’t let anyone touch it, not even him. You can keep away from him, but don’t try to destroy your love. That love is yours. Keep it.” It won’t really break your heart to remember something that got snatched away from you, even though it may feel that way. Prompt: What got taken away from you? New York Times Best Seller author Barbara Sher believes we each have a genius inside us, our Original Vision, and we’ve had it since birth. Our culture tends…
Revive Your Past . . . Prompt #334
Revive Your Past Something inside you is too loyal to permit you to turn your back on everything you loved and simply walk away. No matter how many times people tell you to let the past go, it’s never possible. You’ll never move wholeheartedly into the future unless you take your beloved past with you. And that’s exactly as it should be. There’s no reason to turn your back on a happy past. Sometimes we try to turn away from the past because we feel it somehow betrayed us. It’s as though we loved our past, but our past didn’t love us. So we go on strike and pretend we don’t care, as if to punish fate for being unkind. Fate never cares, of course, so we only hurt ourselves. Prompt: What do you . . . or what does your character pretend to not care about? Today’s prompt is…
Praise Your Past . . . Prompt #333
You can use these prompts to write about something that happened to you or something that happened to someone you know. You can also use these prompts to develop your fictional characters. Prompt: Praise your past. Write a few sentences about the best time in your life. What did you love about that time? What did your work, or life, at that time, look like, smell like, taste like? Could be a big thing or small things. Letting yourself describe every lovely detail will give you back something you lost, a precious time you put out of your mind. When you remember that time by praising it, you’ll have rescued it. You’ll have pulled it out of the corner where you threw it a long time ago. Prompt: What did you, or the character you have created, throw into the corner? Inspired from I Could Do Anything If I Only…
Conjunctions Magazine-unique literary journal
“The sheer size of Conjunctions—book length at nearly 400 pages per issue—is unique in the literary journal landscape. The scope allows editors to take chances on different voices, perspectives, styles and genres that relate to the central theme, and to publish more longform work— such as novellas—that might quite literally not fit in other journals.” —Writer’s Digest, October 2016 About Conjunctions “Conjunctions is an award-wining journal of provocative, innovative fiction, poetry and narrative nonfiction; a living notebook where contemporary masters and astonishing new voices publish their risk-taking, immaculately crafted work.” — Micaela, Morrissette, managing editor Submitting to Conjunctions All submissions from writers in the US should be directed by mail to the editorial office: Bradford Morrow, Editor Conjunctions 21 East 10th St., #3E New York, NY 10003 In order to receive a response, you must enclose a self-addressed envelope stamped with sufficient postage for our reply and for return…