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 “writing”
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
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
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
Mina Witteman 