Apr 29
So, I was at a poetry class the other day (poetry! I know! It totally happened to me!) and someone there said, “I want to write fiction. How do you start?” What a damn good question that I don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about. To my fiction brain, poetry seems to just kind of …
Jan 26
After exhaustive research, I have come to the following conclusion: swans are creep-ass. I think swans are physically weird. This is a totally personal bias based on me being terrified of geese as a small child. My preschool had a farm right next to it, and geese (and once, a cow) would sometimes escape into …
May 09
This came out of a blind pass-the-paper exercise I did back in my class with David Wagoner. It’s an exercise a lot like exquisite corpse, except more aimed at prose than poetry. The structure is to write a male character (pass), a female character (pass), a location (pass), an activity (pass), what he says (pass), …
Feb 25
So, in lieu of me writing something new and provocative for my blog, I’m reposting stuff I’m working on for class. Hah! This is a piece in a very different vein than my last; I had a go at personal essay/memoir writing. I got both the letter and this piece workshopped last Tuesday, and I …
Feb 18
Turns out that this blog doesn’t just update itself. Here’s something I’m working on for my class, wherein we write everything except poetry or short stories…. *** To whom it may concern: I write to you today, not to complain per se (because I know that actual complaint is a bit ridiculous in a place …
Jan 16
One of the basic tricks in a writer’s Bag-O-Tricks is knowing when to use scene, and when to use summary. What the crap does that mean? Well, scene is like a movie: the events are happening in real time, you’re watching them, there we go. It may or may not involve direct dialogue. For example: …