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Writing Exercises
So Nancy Kress gave us a set of writing exercises. One: Write a scene using only dialog. It’s an argument between two people. Two: Write an exposition about the room you’re in. Either you are negative about the room or positive. Only with description set the room as negative or positive. Bring in all five senses, if possible. Three: Take the scene/dialog you wrote, and add the “scenery” to give more detail that explains the scene. Give it a twist with the scenery without otherwise changing the words. (And use the senses.) ONE: DIALOG “That sad little nose isn’t working any more. Take it off.” “Happy Sam gave it to…
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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
There is a great clip on YouTube, where Bob Newhart is a therapist who attempts to help a lady with a problem. For whatever reason, she can’t stop thinking certain negative thoughts, and that bothers her. Bob’s advice is classic, accurate, but powerless: he tells her to just “stop it.” As if knowing something is the key to doing something. Maybe that works for you, but it doesn’t work for me. I mean, the being-told-what-to-do part. Most of us who are adults cannot be made to do anything we really don’t want to do. We usually do what we’ve always done, and try to skate by on a good explanation.…
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Model Garage
We will always need that sense of being connected and that sense of knowing that someone sees us, recognizes us, and finds us valuable.
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Acts of Faith
Have you ever walked into a movie halfway and then spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out what it all means? It makes for a challenging viewing experience—you don’t really know the characters, and you have to guess why people do what they do
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Losing Faith
Have you ever done all the right things, checked all the boxes, filled out all the forms, signed on the dotted line—and still experienced disaster?
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Telling
Maybe it’s that we’re human, but we can all tell our story. Not all of us can tell it with the same degree of passion or generate the same level of interest, but we can usually describe an event and what it meant to us.
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Sometimes the Good Guys Win
How come I can want to do the right thing and be, inside myself, a good person, but both the outside and the inside are broken? How can the universe display such beauty and at the same time such brutality?
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The Right Book Is the Wrong Book
One of the best books I've read so far on writing has been one to say you're probably a crummy writer and you should stay far away from the publishing world.
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Beyond the Bars
I meet with a group of writers every Monday night, and we usually have a short-story competition: we get a writing prompt and we have to develop a story from it in 15 minutes. This is my short story; the writing prompt is the first line in bold, below. Note that I did make a change to the name in the story because the original name was the same as someone I know. Also note that this is the only editing change I made after the story was written. This doesn’t mean that the story is perfect, but I wanted you to see the first draft of what will become…
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Surfing the Avalanche
This week think about the ways you are avoiding help and change. Maybe you think you can do it alone, or maybe you think you must. I can't convince you outright, I think, to step out. If you're convinced of your own hopelessness, then what are my words going to do to change that? But if there's the slightest hint of light, the weakest desire for change, I urge you to find a group who will love you unconditionally and support you without shame.
