Sketching and Jotting Your Way to Victory When you’re trying to write everyday – and especially when you’ve created a blog called the Daily Creative Writer – sometimes it can be hard to come up with material…especially creative material. I tend to do some of my best ad hoc writing when I’m stuck somewhere, like […]
Read more "Be humble. Be brave. Get it on the page."Turn On the Lights After law school I was a bit of a lost soul. I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer – a realization not as unusual as you would think, even after you’ve dumped $100k on a legal education that now seems unsuitable and uncomfortable. I was working as a student […]
Read more "Mold It, Mend It, Change It…Just Make Sure to Write It"Tilling and Sowing the Acre of Characterization We are all main characters in our own stories, even if we sometimes wonder why it feels like we’re always getting second billing. And because we’re living out on own stories, sometimes it can be difficult to suspend our consciousness – or self consciousness – in order to […]
Read more "Developing the “character” of your character."“Even the smallest amount of self-nurturance will have an immediate and beneficial impact on our writing,” advises Julia Cameron in The Right to Write.
Read more "Date nights and the creative pause."Dominating Details Earlier this week, I practiced the art of specificity and came up with some interesting pieces of description. Thanks to Julia Cameron, I was able to take everyday objects and meld them into something a little grander, a little more sublime. By applying specificity to Gary Hoffman’s “railroad ramble,” I captured a snapshot […]
Read more "Inspiration is in the details…"(Sidenote – if you want to see how this writing exercise evolved, please see my previous post about Gary Hoffman’s Writeful.) Under Picasso’s Gaze Taking a break from the every day shuffle and grind of my daily desk-bound vigil, I look around my office with new eyes. On the personalized calendar from a friend, I […]
Read more "The Railroad Ramble Exercise"Full-Brain Style and the Railroad Ramble Taking a break for a moment from those twin mentors Cameron and Lamott, I spent the morning with Gary Hoffman’s Writeful. Hoffman’s book is a bit of a departure from the Right to Write and Bird by Bird in that he’s concerned less with convincing the reader to write […]
Read more "Exploring “Writeful”"What’s for lunch? Yesterday I talked about the tool of specificity. By looking closely at – and writing about – the details, we can often jumpstart the writing process and end up in a completely different place than where we started. The benefit of specificity is that takes out some of the mystery of the […]
Read more "Writing Tool: School Lunches"A new goal for this week: look closer, dig deeper, find the details. When you’re not working on a big project (like a novel or a collection of poems), it can be difficult to get to the page and write something imaginative. But sometimes even the most prosaic of situations or items can contain […]
Read more "Take a closer look"