Tag Archive for ‘Inspiration’
Permission to Write
A small, bare room. An old lamp, an upholstered chair, a wooden desk by the window. Cows and trees beyond. No papers to grade, no phone calls to return. All the things that distract me, keep me from writing fiction — the to-do lists, children’s schedules, work-for-hire, committee meetings — are gone, gone, gone. Some people are here at the Virginia Center for the Arts for six or eight weeks. Me? Only one. And carving this week out of my [...]
Can We Write About Our Kids? Further Reflections
The writer Lisa Gornick revisits this vexing question – and digs a little deeper: A few weeks ago I posted on this site an account of writing — and ultimately deciding not to publish — an essay about my teenaged son. Most of the responses were questions about whether the caution I took with my son should extend to other categories: siblings, spouses, parents, nieces, nephews. These questions pushed me to reflect more deeply on various threads of my decision. The [...]
Get Inspired!
Recently I shared some exercises I use with my students at Fordham for revising fiction and narrative nonfiction. But a lot of us need inspiration at the other end of the process, too — right at the beginning. So below are some of the best writing prompts I’ve used over the years. Some I made up, some I gathered from other writers, and some I found in books. You can approach these any way you wish: write about yourself, another [...]
Revising Nonfiction
Sometimes when you’re revising it helps to have a specific assignment. Last week in this space I listed some exercises that my fiction-writing students find useful. Here are some revision ideas that my memoir and journalism students particularly like: 1) Write down three adjectives (beautiful, aggressive, haughty) that describe a character in your narrative/memoir. (Be sure the adjectives describe different qualities, not the same ones. For instance, handsome, well-groomed, muscular are too similar, as opposed to handsome, talkative, and mechanically [...]
Can We Write about Our Kids?
Novelist and clinical psychologist Lisa Gornick explores this question — and finds an answer she can live with: Last year, I wrote an essay about a dark patch in the otherwise largely luminous life of my sixteen-year-old son. When the essay was finished, I showed it to him. It was Sunday morning. My son put down the newspaper to read the pages I handed him, and I left him alone in the kitchen, busying myself with chores. I was prepared [...]
Inside the Skin
“The older we get, the more … you realize there’s a whole range of things you will never do, of things and people you will never be. As life becomes more and more limiting, there is something wonderful about being able to get inside the skin of people unlike yourself.” — Lee Smith Lee Smith is the author, most recently, of Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
Before You Write Today
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” — William Faulkner
Bi-Curious about Writing Fiction
This was never the way she planned — not her intention. But journalist Cindy Schweich Handler wrote some fiction. And she liked it. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. And since I was an avid reader of fiction as a kid, that meant being a novelist. I was in fourth grade when I wrote the vaguely titled “Castle of Things,” a blatant rip-off of “Alice in Wonderland.” A year later, I followed this [...]
Reinventing the Novel
My friend Pamela Redmond Satran is a novelist, New York Times bestselling author, ninja web developer, and one-time magazine editor. Now she’s embarking on something entirely new: Two things inspired me to write my new novel, Ho Springs, online, day by day, instead of writing it for a conventional publisher the way I did my first five novels. Well, two things that are easy to explain. The first was my husband, after watching the DVD of American Gangster, telling me he found [...]
Writing Tip #11: Don't Listen to Hackneyed Advice
Write what you know? On second thought … “Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words ‘Write what you know’ is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don’t. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?” – P. J. O’Rourke “It still comes as a shock to realize that I don’t write about what I know; I write [...]
