creative-writing
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In spring 2020, I attend a Zoom workshop with Jenny Offill on Writing Erasure Poetry and Flash Fiction. The entire session was insightful, but one of the main things I took away from the session was Offill’s idea of “Stretching the Canvas.” She told a story of being at an artists’ residency where she spoke…
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I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations. Possibly because the writing of the second draft of my novel is so different from how I expected it would be. When I started working on this draft, my intention was to write what I called “a slow draft.” I’d written most of my first draft very quickly,…
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A few years ago, I had a meeting with one of the professors in my MFA program. We were meant to discuss an idea I had for a novel, but instead, we talked mainly about my process. I’d just been at a craft session where a writer talked about how you should be writing, strongly…
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I spent most of May moving from one space in my house to another—and doing all the tasks that go along with any sort of move. Packing, cleaning, lugging, re-painting, unpacking, figuring out what goes where, wracking my brain to figure out what box the one thing I desperately need had been tucked into. Over…
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It rained last night, and on my walk this morning, there were several earthworms who had been forced out of the ground. Earthworms always make me think of this period in my life when I was working as an Assistive Technology Tutor. I travelled to different schools, and I worked with students in small groups…
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When I was eight, I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I still have my earliest efforts, the covers made out of old scraps of wallpaper, stories of missing jelly beans and mysteriously oversized pumpkins and making friends with a green alien named Bob. My classmates wrote encouraging comments in…
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For the past month I’ve been working on a project that terrifies me. Which means, of course, I haven’t really started it. It’s an idea I’ve had for two – or maybe it’s three years now. I think I’d half-convinced myself I never would write it. And then, spurred by some outside forces, I…
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For weeks I’ve been struggling with the point of view of my current short story. For a Story is a State of Mind exercise, I chose a first person central point of view, but that exercise has blossomed into an unruly narrative with over 8,000 words of freewriting that I’m now trying to rein in. And I…
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I’ve been reading Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer as part of my weekly craft reading. In his introduction to the text, John Gardner writes that the problems facing new writers haven’t changed much from 1934 (when the volume was first published) to today. There are four key difficulties Brande discusses early in the text: the writer who…
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I saw this time lapse video by Jean-Michel, Timelapse: une araignée tisse sa toile, via BrainPickings several weeks ago and have been meaning to post about it ever since. It seemed, when I watched it, such a perfect metaphor for my process when I enter the drafting stage. I move forward bit by bit each day, spinning…