The First Irish Draft Is Finished

It’s a shambling bramble patch of a draft, but the novel formerly known as “Irish Roots” has now been written through to the end. It’s about 100,000 words, prints out as 350 pages. I’ve been working on it since February 2008. I was boosted in my efforts by two workshops and a local gang of

A Week of Prompts: Saturday

To round out our week, one last book: The Write Brain Workbook: 366 Exercises to Liberate Your Writing by Bonnie Neubauer

A Week of Prompts: Friday

Setting the Scene We start with “Where does the scene take place?” (and that’s the prompt for today). But we can add depth for the reader: time of day, sensory experiences, attitudes of the characters to this place and time, how it compares to other settings . . .

A Week of Prompts: Thursday

A book! An honest-to-gosh book! The Pocket Muse, Monica Wood Photos, essays about the writing life and getting it done, quotes, random thoughts, and prompts. This kind of thing could be a sappy soup, but I’ve found it to be a great testament to noticing: what you have available to you is enough, so do

A Week of Prompts: Wednesday

2010 Writer’s Challenge This is a blog put together by some grads of Emerson University to keep their writing going. The challenge is simple: “I will write every day.” They put up a blog post every day with anything from a few words to a writing exercise to get you moving.

A Week of Prompts: Tuesday

one word “simple. you’ll see one word at the top of the following page. you have sixty seconds to write about it. as soon as you click ‘go’ the page will load with the cursor in place.”

A Week of Prompts: Monday

The Forecast What’s the horoscope? How do the I Ching sticks throw down? If you had a fortune cookie right now, what would it tell you? Prompt:

A Week of Prompts: Sunday

The From the Heart chapter of RWA has a writing group contrarily called the Procrastinators. Really what we do is pick a week or two every month to post goals and encourage each other to move forward, with quotes, cheerleading, and tips. I’m the host this month, and I thought I’d cross-post the tips. Today’s

The Devices We Reach For

Karen Quah wrote about the stories we tell over and over in our work, and it got me thinking of what else we come back to in our creative work. Along with what kinds of stories we retell, do we reuse ways to tell them? In my various projects, I’m going on my third or

First Pages

My Monday morning writing club has an ongoing argument about the importance of a quick start to a novel: diving right in versus a slower reveal. The rulemeisters say it’s all got to be there on the first page: meet the hero, introduce the conflict, set the tone and genre. The first page makes a