{"id":6300,"date":"2016-12-19T14:50:41","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T21:50:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=6300"},"modified":"2016-12-19T15:02:08","modified_gmt":"2016-12-19T22:02:08","slug":"nostalgia-and-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/nostalgia-and-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgia and writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"writers-dreaming\"<\/a>When responding to a writing prompt, you are completely free to write the absolute truth, with no worries about what anyone will think.\u00a0 You are also free to write fiction. You have the freedom to write whatever you want . . .\u00a0 these writings are called freewrites.<\/p>\n

There are over 300 prompts on The Write Spot Blog<\/a>. You can choose one at any time and just write.<\/p>\n

Sometimes our writing takes us to memories from our childhood, a very powerful place that is important and so intoxicating.<\/p>\n

From Writers Dreaming<\/em><\/a>, by Naomi Epel,\u00a0 chapter by James W. Hall:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that I\u2019ve discovered through reading a lot of best-sellers, studying a lot of popular fiction for courses that I\u2019ve given at the university, is that there are certain recurrent, mythic qualities in books that we could consider, from an elitist academic viewpoint, to be pulp or low-life, mass-market fiction. But obviously they have a certain kind of power or else three million people wouldn\u2019t buy and be excited about them. One of the things I found out was that there were these recurrent patterns. One, for instance, that I feel has a kind of mythic quality, is what I came to call, in a particular class on bestsellers, \u201cthe golden place.\u201d This is where the novel begins to picture a time and place, usually both of those, where the grass was greener, the flowers smelled better, the birds chirped more purely and everything was simply better. Usually associated with childhood and long ago. It\u2019s a form of nostalgia, I suppose, but when you see it in a fictional form it has a tremendous power to call us to our best, ideal selves. We feel in ourselves that such golden places are possible to return to, to reacquire, to rediscover and I think that one of the hungers we bring to the reading experience is to go to other people\u2019s golden places and live there, temporarily. A place that is coherent, that makes sense, where values are still valuable and ideals are possible to achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note from Marlene:<\/strong> Our freewrites are much like what Hall describes \u2013 when we go back in memory, we touch \u201cthe golden place\u201d and \u201cnostalgia\u201d \u2014 a place where the reader\/listener wants to live where you did and do what you did\u2014 and that speaks to the power of writing.<\/p>\n

Your writing has\u00a0 \u201c. . . in a fictional form. . . a tremendous power. . . \u201c<\/p>\n

So, keep writing. Write for yourself with no judging nor critiquing. Just Write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When responding to a writing prompt, you are completely free to write the absolute truth, with no worries about what anyone will think.\u00a0 You are also free to write fiction. You have the freedom to write whatever you want . . .\u00a0 these writings are called freewrites. There are over 300 prompts on The Write […]<\/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":true,"_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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[126],"tags":[6,105,342,10,11],"class_list":["post-6300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-write-2","tag-freewrites","tag-just-write","tag-the-write-spot-blog","tag-writing-freely","tag-writing-prompts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-1DC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6300","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=6300"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6310,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6300\/revisions\/6310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}