Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing

Posts from the “Books” Category

Let Your Inner Critic Speak

Posted on November 17, 2012

It’s almost done, the course Teaching Creative Writing. We have just a couple more months to go before graduation. Today we had a masterclass from a colleague writer/teacher focussing on the ‘guerilla between the writer and the creative writing teacher’. We started the day with an extraordinary writing exercise. One that kinda freaked us out, like a walk in the Paris catacombs can freak you out. You all know about the inner critic, that nagging voice in the back of your heads that persists in telling you that you suck, major league. Like most of us, I have learned to silence that voice, trick it into believing that I am not interested in its musings. But silenced or not, it is always there, lurking…

No three-letter-words

Posted on November 16, 2012

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,…

Listening while writing

Posted on August 1, 2012

Would that work, I wondered, listening while writing? I listen to music when I write. Often. Sometimes to cheer me on, sometimes to land me in another world, sometimes to up the tension. Music without lyrics usually, because lyrics tend to mess up my words. When a colleague creative writing teacher posted a link to THE NEW YORKER Fiction Podcasts I hurried over to the site. Writers heaven, I tell you. Writers heaven! A monthly reading and conversation with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Every month an author reads a short story written by another author. They pick the piece themselves, talk it over with Treisman and then they read. I downloaded the available podcasts through iTunes and listened to the first, to the second. And…

To blog or not to blog

Posted on March 8, 2012

My good friend Richard Tulloch mused in his blog post of today over the tyrannical regime of blog hits. With that blog post, he touched a tender spot in my blogging system. Is blogging about numbers? Is it about the content of your post? Is it something else, something we can’t quite grasp? This is what I commented on Richard’s blog post: I remember one good friend – a famous Australian writer, not unknown to yourself, Richard – who told me at the onset of my blogging life, that the best way to start was to never check the stats. Of course, that heartfelt advice never actually landed in my brain and, being the math girl I am, I obsessively checked the stats, leaving me…