{"id":210,"date":"2013-10-29T12:24:36","date_gmt":"2013-10-29T19:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=210"},"modified":"2013-10-29T12:24:36","modified_gmt":"2013-10-29T19:24:36","slug":"amy-zhang-and-your-scraps-of-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/amy-zhang-and-your-scraps-of-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Amy Zhang and your scraps of writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

My dear friend, Arlene Mandell, asked a question the other day that I\u2019ve been pondering. What happens to our scraps of writing?\u00a0 What can we do with our journal writing and our freewrites?<\/p>\n

I just read \u201cThe Secret Life of a Teenage Author\u201d by Amy Zhang in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers. Zhang\u2019s honesty and confession led me to want to learn more about her.<\/p>\n

Her blog, \u201cA Story of a Dreamer,<\/a>\u201d is inspiring and delightful. The October 10 post begins, \u201cIf You Give an Author Some Chocolate \u2026to encourage her to revise, she\u2019ll eat it. She\u2019ll eat it slowly because there is an art to eating chocolate bars. She\u2019ll try to revise while holding the chocolate bar in one hand, but realize that she can\u2019t revise without proper music.<\/p>\n

If you let an author look for proper music, she\u2019ll decide that her normal revising playlist simply isn\u2019t good enough, and she will use up a good half an hour trying to develop a new one before finding the perfect one on 8track.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your details might be different,<\/b> but you have probably been in the same situation as Zhang. You sit down to write, but one thing leads to another. You eventually get back to writing, but it\u2019s a circuitous route.<\/p>\n

Her September 15 post is called, Sh*t People Say to Writers.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cLast Sunday, my local newspaper wrote a story about me\u2026and my writing\u2026and stuff. Those of you who have followed my blog for a while know that I used to be very, very<\/i>\u00a0secretive about writing. I never talked about it. So this week was WEIRD and awkward and generally hard for me, but on the bright side, I FINALLY get to write this post! I\u2019ve always wanted to. \u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where you come in, my writing friends<\/b>, \u00a0. . . you know those free writes and short-shorts you have written and don\u2019t know what to do with?\u00a0 Turn them into short stories, or combine them, as Zhang did:<\/p>\n

\u201cUNTITLED (we\u2019ll just call it that for now\u2013isn\u2019t it easier?) actually began as two short stories\u2013one about an abandoned imaginary friend, and one about a girl who tries to commit suicide. UNTITLED is their lovechild. I\u2019m not sure where the ideas for the two original short stories came from, but I knew there was a connection between them and I knew I wanted to develop that connection into a full-length novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your turn: <\/b>Select excerpts of your writing, turn them into a short story. I\u2019ll suggest where you can submit your writing in future posts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My dear friend, Arlene Mandell, asked a question the other day that I\u2019ve been pondering. What happens to our scraps of writing?\u00a0 What can we do with our journal writing and our freewrites? I just read \u201cThe Secret Life of a Teenage Author\u201d by Amy Zhang in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[126],"tags":[38,43,42,39,19,36,41,40],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-write-2","tag-amy-zhang","tag-arlene-mandell","tag-authors","tag-chicken-soup-for-the-soul","tag-gorgeous-writing","tag-inspirational-writing","tag-novel-ideas","tag-short-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-3o","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}