Writing prompts are an excellent way of keeping the writing juices flowing. It is supposed to be an old writer’s adage that you should write every day. Some advise you to write in the early morning, even before the day has begun, with your eyes still closed just penning down what bubbles up from your subconscious. Others think it’s best to allocate a dedicated time frame to writing and force yourself to scribble down anything, even if it’s a shopping list, as long as you keep your hand moving. Both methods and numerous others have their merits, but require at least some form of self-discipline, a trait that we writers seem to lack every now and again, be it because we lure ourselves into the…
Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing
Posts tagged “Creative Writing”
The Grimm Way Check out my blog post on the TeachingAuthors Blog, where I show how I use Little Red Riding Hood to explain my creative writing students the necessity of conflict in story. The last exercise in the blog posts asks you to write two new short stories featuring Little Red Riding Hood. For the first one, you pick a problem that fits you best as a writer. For the second one – and this is the hard one – pick a problem that fits you least as a writer. Go read the blog post and challenge yourself. Raise the stakes for both Little Red Riding Hood and yourself. Looking forward to reading your stories!
Categories: A Bit of Everything
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…
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
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.…
A couple days ago I skipped past my inner critic. It was a truly liberating feeling knowing that I can easily bypass that nagging voice. Freed from my inner constraints, I moved on to the next project. I sat down to research my graduation article “Collaborative Writing, Contradictio In Terminis?” and maybe push out the first paragraphs. For that, I reread an article sent to me by colleague writer and creative writing instructor Chris Eboch. A line in that article triggered me. Chris writes about two colleagues who formed an online group. When they discovered that male writers were much better at supporting themselves as a writer, they began to ask themselves ‘What would a guy do?’ The positive results of their question soon showed in their…
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…
Tagged: Creative Writing, Inner Critic, Literature, Mina Witteman, writing
Mina Witteman 