I’m chest deep in a revision of my novel right now, but I’m also reading Alice Munro, who makes me want to work on short fiction. So I figured this week, I’d put my hands together and do a revision exercise on one of my long-problematic short stories. Because this is slightly complicated, I’m goingContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Revision”
Tag Archives: writing exercises
A Writer’s Notebook: First line
For the exercise, see below. Henrietta stood nervously on the railway platform watching the passengers disembark. She could smell the grime down between tracks, the grease built up in the undercarriage, the stale odor of the passengers as their sweat and breath mingled with their alcohol, their cheese sandwiches, their dry newsprint, all of itContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: First line”
A Writer’s Notebook: Introduction
My friend Lori Ann Bloomfield and I have been swapping e-mails about writing exercises lately (from which exchanges I’ve cribbed some of this post). We were talking about first lines, and I mentioned that my story “Bathe in the Doggone Sin” started out as a first-line exercise. Which got me thinking about writing exercises inContinue reading “A Writer’s Notebook: Introduction”
Is there anybody out there? Sensory deprivation and creative writing
I’m currently (and rapidly) revising my second novel, which also served at my dissertation and which is set in an afterlife, with a dead narrator and a whole mess of dead characters. The harderst part, I think, is the opening, the first third of the book, because at heart the novel is a roadtrip adventureContinue reading “Is there anybody out there? Sensory deprivation and creative writing”
It was a dark and stormy writer’s block….
A long time ago, when I was a nerd in high school, I hung out with a bunch of other nerds in high school and we played role playing games. You know the bit Mike Myers did on his 2001 appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, with one eye crossed and speaking in a lisp asContinue reading “It was a dark and stormy writer’s block….”
An assignment for me
My students are busily typing away at an assignment I’ve given them. Which surprises me. Ordinarily, when I bring my classes to a computer lab, I have to all but beat students away from IM, Facebook, YouTube, or any of the other distractions I, too, would ordinarily have open in side windows. But either they’reContinue reading “An assignment for me”
Freewriting
The other day, I introduced my students to freewriting and its more structured cousin, looping. As I always do when making my students write in class, I brought my own notebook (a smooth black thing with a red-ribbon bookmark and a folding magnetic flap embossed with a Japanese kanji for “joy”), and I wrote withContinue reading “Freewriting”
Samuel Snoek-Brown 