Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing

Posts tagged “writing

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,…

When protagonists rock your manuscript

Posted on October 4, 2012

Sometimes it feels like this writing business is a never ending story. Is there any time that a writer can say goodbye to his manuscript and send it off with a feeling of having pulled off something good? I doubt it. For me, it seems almost impossible.  I have been working on this manuscript – ICARUS’ DOOM – for a while now. The first version I rejected myself, the second version was manhandled (in a good way!) by my publisher friend, my agent and my critique partners, and still the third version didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted it. The story was there. It was a good story, a thrilling story, but something was off. I twisted it, I turned it. To…

Why Writers Rock

Posted on November 1, 2010

These past few months my life seems to revolve around words and chords, around writing and music. It made me rethink the name of my blog and my dear friend Jay unwittingly told me what it should be: Writers Rock. Words come in multiples as I am working on the revision of my thriller Dark Fiber. One day I hit 5,000 words and the next day I don’t even come close to a mere 500. But no matter how many words do find their way from inside my head to my manuscript, music accompanies them all. If I am on a roll, I switch my iTunes controls to repeat and listen to the same song over and over again, until I almost fall in a…

Amsterdam view: writing a good read

Posted on October 26, 2010

These days I am writing an average of 3,500 words a day revising my thriller DARK FIBER. It’s hard work, leaving me no time for a social life whatsoever. Luckily that isn’t a problem at all, because my protagonist Jonathan Kelder doesn’t have a social life either, and part of my method of writing is that I like to experience what my protagonists’ go through. If they go out rafting, I go out rafting. If they hike cold and misty mountains in Canada, I hike the same cold and misty mountains. I love doing what my protagonists do. And I think it works. One of the compliments I get from readers is that reading my books make them feel like they are actually joining…

Amsterdam view: a writer’s autumn

Posted on October 20, 2010

Today’s a writing day. I can feel it in my bones, I can see it outside. It is the most perfect weather for a writer, here in Amsterdam. Like yesterday – when I did 5,000 words on the revision of my techno thriller Turing’s Deceit, a.k.a. Dark Fiber – autumn races past my window, pushing on every writing fiber in my body. A stiff northern wind brings me sunshine and bright skies one minute, hail and thunderstorms the next. It is as if the Northern gods urge me to write faster and faster, as if they want me and my protagonist to hurry up, and get us to Ragnarök to fight that mythical war against the great serpent. I am wondering whether my protagonist…

Amsterdam view: Flow Works

Posted on September 22, 2010

Every writer longs for it: that time that words seemingly effortless find their way from your head to your manuscript and your fingers become instruments creating works of art. It’s the time that sentences build themselves, that the plot moves forward at just the right pace: slow where it needs to ease the reader into your story, fast where it needs the reader to hold his breath and run along with the protagonist through hot and dry deserts and under ominously thundering skies. Yes, every writer longs for the FLOW. I long for that flow, too. Sometimes it’s music that gets me right there. A great song or an album on repeat – Levon Helm’s ‘Ophelia’, Eddie Vedder’s ‘Guaranteed’ or an album like Anouar…