Vivid writing engages all the senses. But a writer doesn’t slather cobalt blue and Prussian blue and titanium white onto the page to paint the sky as it darkens before a rain. She can’t reach for her trumpet and belt a B-flat to herald the end of an act. He rarely has the opportunity to slide a sliver of dark chocolate laced with habanero chile between his readers’ lips. And when was the last time a book reached out with a feather and tickled that spot at the base of your neck? Writers use words to awaken and engage a reader’s …
Tag: writing prompts
The Wild Freedom of 100 Lines
My writing friend in Mexico introduced me months ago to author CM Mayo’s generous web offering: 365 five-minute writing exercises. Somewhere among those exercises is one that suggests writing 100 lines about a story, scene, idea. I don’t remember the exact details of her exercise, but I am completely addicted to the flexibility it has inspired, and I use it all the time. These days, when I’m diving into a new scene, I begin with 100 lines of free association. These free me of fear and lead me to infinite discoveries, including: dialogue, emotionally evocative sensory details, physical descriptions, various …
FLASH FICTION, FLASH MEMOIR!
Writers of full-length narrative may easily be enticed by the extreme brevity of flash fiction. A story with a word-count of 250 to 1000 words forces its creator to dive right into the thick of things. And what a joy to complete a story in minutes instead of months. Now, writers of memoir can join in the dash. Recently, the magazine More encouraged its readers to write and post a six-word memoir. Their example: Revenge is living well, without you. —Joyce Carol Oates, from Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. To read other six word memoirs and …
Free Writing Course
If you’ve been yearning to write that novel, memoir, poem or article, the first thing to know is that you’ve already begun. So much of the creative process has to do with what is unconscious—your mind is constantly generating ideas and images outside the realm of consciousness. You are incubating story seeds and growing stories when you dream, day or night, when you drive to work, when you stir the sauce for your kids’ favorite pasta or fold laundry, when you run the dogs or work on a jigsaw puzzle. Take is step by step in my free writing course, …