Tomorrow will be D-Day for me and my fellow students, my brothers-in-ink. If all goes well, we will be teachers creative writing from that day on, accredited by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. To honour our hard work over the past three semesters my colleagues and I now challenge YOU: Write an opening line for a story or a poem with or inspired by this picture and post it as a comment to this blog post. Captivate us in one single line. Can you do that? I bet you can! My colleagues and I will choose the best line. The writer of that line will be awarded The City of Inspiration and Writing People, two writing maps from the Write Around Town Map…
Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing
Posts from the “A Bit of Everything” Category
That’s an interesting one: Toot Your Horn. At the Daily Post they figure that most of us are excellent at being self-deprecating, but not so good at the opposite. Tell us your favorite thing about yourself, is today’s prompt. Tooting my horn? That sounds a lot like the final assignment before graduation, early next month, when my colleagues and I can proudly state that we are accredited creative writing teachers. The assignment? Pitch yourself in no more than 100 words to let future clients know what you have to offer. So here it is… The Discovery of the Writer Students come to me with a writer’s dream. Hesitantly, because who dares to claim he is talented enough? I show them that craftsmanship and a…
Helpless. It is how I felt during 2012, with so many people I dearly loved passing away. With every death my creativity died a little, too, until I felt I had lost all connection with my projects, with my writing. It left me helpless and I had to shelve manuscripts and translation efforts. The creative juices simply stopped flowing. Would I ever write again, I wondered? Get those juices flowing again? Yes! I just had to remember all the good things in life, too, even if they were into deep hiding, like the Trapajon guy in his tree. I had to reach inside and pull out the good times: my son graduating from High School, a short children’s story published…
Categories: A Bit of Everything
Tagged: 220W, AFdH Uitgevers, Creative Writing, creativity, Helpless, Ploegsma, Trapajon, tree, Vijanera, writing
May 2013 be filled with love and words and words you love!
Categories: A Bit of Everything
Tagged: 2013, Love, Mina Witteman, New Year, Words
Tagged: 2013, February fairmaid, Happy New Year, illusion, Mina Witteman, picture poem, snowdrop, spring
It seems that the popularity of ultra short stories is on the rise. Events with famous writers of short stories, like the brilliant and funny A.L. Kennedy, and — to me — the empress of the short story Lydia Davis prove it. I like that, because I have this thing going for flash fiction. I love reading it and I love writing it. Writing with a constraint on word count forces you to zoom in on the very essence of your story. It pushes you to be terse. It allows you to rip out every empty word. No more than 220 Words. That was the prerequisite to enter the contest for the A.L. Snijders Award for Flash Fiction 2012. I had the story in a flash,…
Categories: A Bit of Everything, Books
Another prompt from The Daily Post: Open your nearest book to page 82. Take the third full sentence on the page, and work it into a post somehow. I suspected a hard one as I am reading ‘The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing’, doing research for my graduation article. We’ll see… I had been teaching creative writing for quite a while, mainly workshops and short courses, mostly to young people. One day I found myself standing before a particularly challenging class. Fifteen boys sized me up and said: “Writing? Seriously?” They sat back, folded their arms and waited, their body language screaming “no way”. The girls — an ominous thirteen of them — looked up, too. “You’re not Carrie Slee,” was all they said.…
Mina Witteman 