writing-blocks
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This is a transcript of Episode 1: Encased from The Divine Dissatisfaction Podcast. Click here to listen to the episode. Here where I live in southwestern Ontario, we have, not often, but definitely more often than we used to, these periods of freezing rain. And on those mornings, I take my dog to the park, and we…
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In my last blog, I wrote about those critical voices inside our heads that never seem to completely leave the creative process. If you’re struggling with your inner critic in your writing practice, here are three things to try: Here are a few additional resources on working with your inner critic: Get Rid of That…
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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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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…