Years ago I took a workshop from William Kittredge who taught creative writing at the University of Montana for thirty years. He said when he first started out teaching he was concerned with providing his students with information and techniques for writing. As time progressed he found that the most important [...]
Earlier I explained you could start with the word kumquats and if you let it, the writing would take you where it really wants to go. Below is a poem of mine that came from starting with the word raspberries and having no idea what I was going to write. This is [...]
Recently in my morning writing class I was explaining if you get your mind out of the way to allow what wants to be written from the place of your deeper wisdom and knowing, (aka the intelligence of your heart) then what truly wants to be written will flow out. I exclaimed, “You could write [...]
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently, there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is not possibility. . .of saying, I’ll do it if I feel like it. – John Steinbeck
Woody Allen [...]
. . . writing is the slow, cumulative way of accepting your life as valid, of accepting yourself over a lifetime, of realizing that your life is important. And it is. It’s all you’ve got. All you ever had for sure. – Richard Hugo
I first started keeping a journal in college and have maintained that [...]
I first encountered the concept of freewriting in 1977 when I found Peter Elbow’s book, Writing with Teachers. Elbow, who had been a professor at MIT, presented this way of working on your writing that is at once simpler and more powerful than any other way I know. I’ve come to believe that most writer’s [...]
Please get out of the habit of saying that you’ve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you. – Robert Olen Butler
About [...]
Since all writers often experience resistance at facing the blank page it helps to find a pattern in the physical world that can assist you in crossing the threshold into the writing mind. Here are some the elements for you to consider.
Implements: People often ask me when they sign up for one of my writing [...]