Filling the Nooks and Crannies So how do you write? It seems like a simple question, but I bet my answer would be different from yours. In fact, I bet my answer this afternoon would be slightly different from what I’d say tomorrow, or what I would’ve described yesterday. One thing I know for sure […]
Read more "Overcoming Your Slacker Tendencies"Tips and Tools of the Trade: Notes from the Writer’s Workshop (Part 2) (Please see yesterday’s blog for an explanation and introduction.) From the presentation “Creative Nonfiction” Prior to working as an editor, I was briefly a staff writer for our publishing house – churning 3000 word features on everything from road maintenance safety to heavy […]
Read more "Getting Creative With The Truth"Tips and Tools of the Trade: Notes from a Writer’s Workshop (Part 1) Sadly, the economic downturn killed one of the most valuable programs offered by my hometown’s continuing education program – a mini writer’s workshop. The workshop – designed as a one day distillation of the larger, week-long writer’s conference hosted by the city […]
Read more "Telling Tales and Spilling Secrets"Getting Lucky Are you getting some? If not, why not? There are no rules. Get it where you can. “Don’t make it fancy. Do it on the kitchen table… flash your moves like Jessica Lange’s white panties in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Do it in the back of a pew at church. Do it […]
Read more "You know what you need…get some!"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"“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…"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"
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