Lots of people read on the subway. But how about writing on the subway?
The NY Writers Coalition recently offered many the chance to do just that–by transforming a subway car into a free writing workshop! With pens and paper in hand, a group of writers on the #7 train wrote from Times Square [...]
In the illuminating introduction to her Selected Stories, Alice Munro considers the recurring setting of her fiction: “The reason I write so often about the country to the east of Lake Huron is just that I love it.”
She goes on to describe how memories of particular images from that geography will motivate her [...]
Some of the students loved words like “denial” and “dysfunction.” Characters in fiction “had issues.” It was the early 90s and people talked like this.
I’d just gotten a flyer in my mailbox announcing the World’s Best Short Short Story contest sponsored by Florida State University and the late Jerome Stern. I made copies of the 1991 winner, “Baby, [...]
When I was in high school, I took a playwriting class, and we’d sit there–all of us sixteen, seventeen, eighteen–reading our work aloud around the table. Our teacher, who was about thirty, would give us pointers: that speech is clunky; this character hasn’t said anything for ten minutes. But sometimes he wouldn’t say [...]
Desire is the writer’s best friend. When you know what your main character wants, you have your entire story. When someone wants something–badly–he or she will get up off the couch and try to attain it. The object of desire might be a new winter coat (”The Overcoat” by Gogol), a boy (”City of Boys” [...]
Write what you know without simply writing what you know …
Write What You Know. I’ve never felt wholly comfortable with this phrase. I tell my students to abandon the literal idea of it on the first day of class. How bored and boring we’d all be if that were all any of us ever wrote. [...]
…using only the words from The Cat in the Hat. Or could I?
That’s the challenge posed by one of the prompts at the Tumblr site Writing Prompts. (Don’t worry, they’re helpfully listed for your reference. Did you know The Cat in the Hat contains the word “shame”?)
The site has a huge [...]
Perhaps one of your resolutions this year was to write more. (You too?) And now January is two-thirds over, and well, you haven’t done quite as much as you’d hoped.
All you need is a gentle kick in the pants prompt to get you started. This year, two great writing sites are [...]
Here’s a great gift for a young writer, a game buff, or a teacher. The Storymatic provides 500 cards suggesting characters, images, and events to lead players into a story:
First, draw two gold cards. Combine the information on the two cards to create your main character. For example, if you draw “surgeon” and “amateur [...]
Even the most dedicated writers go through “not-writing” phases, deliberate or accidental ones. And when we return to our writing desks after that week or month or year away, our fingers and voices may feel…rusty. How do we get back that indescribable “it,” the voice that drives our prose and compels us to write it?
The [...]
