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 “Literature”
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.…
Bart Moeyaert is one of the most famous, if not the most famous of writers in the Dutch language. He writes novels and short stories, for adults and children alike. I love his work, I love his thoughts, I love the way he provokes thoughts. We had the privilege of having him teach a masterclass at our school, early November. If you are looking for inspiration… you will find it with him. Sit back and listen to his address at TEDxFlanders, where he talks about silence and introspection.
Tagged: Bart Moeyaert, Books, dutch language, Flanders, introspection, Literature, novels, short stories, TED, writing
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…
A big chunk of my writer friends ‘do’ NaNoWriMo again this year, National Novel Writing Month. I suspect most people are familiar with the concept: write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month, starting November 1 and ending November 30. Some of my friends breeze through this year’s NaNoWriMo, others struggle with every word. Me? I’m skipping NaNoWriMo altogether. Not because I don’t like challenges. I LOVE a good challenge. I LOVE to win, too, and in the run-up to NaNoWriMo, I was filled with eager anticipation. Another chance to push out a novel, another chance to show that I have a writer’s stamina, an artist’s perseverance. While thinking up a plot for my next NaNoWriMo novel, I took a good look at…
Tagged: english translations, Literature, Mina Witteman, NaNoWriMo, Picture Books, thrillers, writing, YA
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 