Tag Archives: creative process
I Know It When I See It.
I dabbled in writing erotica for a few months, knowing full well that once my fiction class started I would have to set it aside temporarily and not necessarily get serious -good erotica is its own art- but get whatever the opposite of writing dirty stories is for me.
Guess how long that lasted?
I had this [...]
SPARK, Round 7
The seventh round of SPARK -my third time participating- closed this weekend. I love this project, partly for the collective creative energy, and partly for the deadline. Having ten days to come up with something relatively complete keeps me from dreying over this particular turn of phrase or that, and instead, just telling the damn [...]
Strawberry Freeze
The heat was broken at the usually warm and friendly Cyclops Books tonight, so those of use who went to the MWA Baltimore meeting to do a little writing did so with numb fingers, reading our work with voices thinned from the cold.
Exercise #1 was to dig into a bag of paint color cards and [...]
Smile, Hon, You’re Reading a Dirty Story in Front of Several Dozen People
First of all, prior to the Smile, Hon reading at Atomic Books tonight, I hit myself in the head with a door and may have broken a toe, in two mostly unrelated incidents. It makes me wonder if it is my own, non-verbal equivalent of telling my alter ego to “break a leg,” only in [...]
And now for something completely different…
A love poem.
This love, a roughly knitted blanket
tangles between my bare feet
as I lay awake and
unravel like a lopsided stitch.
(Rumi wuz here.)
[Edited to add: since I was just asked, I guess I should clarify that I wrote this. Rumi was just there to help out.]
White Space
The concept of white space in fiction has my attention. It came up in class that white space – the use of a break between sections of short fiction – is a relatively new device, and it is accepted because of our familiarity with jump cuts in film. Simply stated, moving directly from one point [...]
First Class
This afternoon I was jolted by the thought: what if I walk into class tonight and realize this was a huge mistake? That would suck.
The icebreaker for the evening was pairing off and then introducing the other person to the class, including something odd or surprising. When asked to reveal something odd or surprising about [...]
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For the past day or two I have been thinking about Centralia, PA. Centralia is on the list of things with which I have become obsessed. Some one told me about it in college, and since then, the thought of it often flickers through my head when I’m writing, or thinking about Pennsylvania, or for [...]
Put in My Place