Daily prompt prompts me to write an entire blog post without using three-letter-words. A true challenge, particularly to a foreigner like me. Could I do that? An entire post without a single three-letter-word? We will discover quickly.

When procrastinating my days away on the internet, I came across this wonderful blog post by Shaun Levin. Shaun is an English writer. He is also a writing teacher, always exploring ways to inspire students, ways to inspire himself. When Shaun designs writing courses, he bases them on a premise: through direct experience of a city writers deepen their understanding, their experience of a sense of place, they become more aware of a city’s relevance to whichever prose genre. By writing, eating, walking, floating around a city, by being away from their desks, writers will discover strangeness in familiar objects or well-known events.
To help writers to enrich their writing with finding other ways of using built or natural landscapes, Shaun came up with an absolute brilliant plan: Writing Maps. Maps that guide writers through a city of inspiration, past characters, even through their writing life.

I ordered Shaun’s maps by sponsoring Shaun’s Writing Maps Indiegogo project. Last week, I received a first collection of maps. I used them with SCBWI’s Amsterdam Critique Group, last Sunday. We loved them! Look at what we accomplished with a simple writing prompt as ‘write your character’s entire life story in this shape’:

Writing Maps: A Character’s Life

Neat, eh?

Interested in Shaun’s Writing Maps, go to Write Around Town!
To order writing maps, go to Writing Maps!

Found three-letter-words? Tell me!