mindset
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I must have started this month’s post over a dozen times in my head, thinking of an idea, turning it around a few times in my mind, and then dismissing it, the flash of inspiration extinguished by the desire to get it right. Because January brings with it a particular pressure—even if what we’re trying
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A couple of weeks ago, I became frustrated while prepping for my Introduction to Creative Writing class. I was trying to decide on a writing exercise to use for our lesson on character, and I couldn’t figure out which one to use. When I used to teach Communications and Business Writing, the courses were always
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Fall has always felt like a season of re-commitment to my writing. Often that’s taken the form of really digging into a particular project — either beginning something new or deep revision of a work-in-progress. This fall has looked different than the last few, though. Late in August I was offered the chance to teach
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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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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
heather debling 