Tag Archives: trust your writing

Interview with Jennifer Jamieson Woods About Writing Her Autobiographical Novel No Guarantees

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Last week, we posted Chapter 40 of Jennifer Jamieson Woods’ autobiographical novel No Guarantees.  This week’s post is an interview with the author about writing the novel she needed to write. Sheila Jennifer, thank you for sharing the story of writing No Guarantees as well as Chapter 40 from the book for Writing It Real … Continue reading →

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Staying in a Committed Relationship With Your Writing

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According to Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary, commitment means “the state of being bound emotionally or intellectually to an ideal or course of action.” Emotionally or intellectually are good words for the writer to fuse. To keep on writing requires both an emotional and cognitive desire. A writer feels pleased and almost propelled to … Continue reading →

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The Light Had Been Shining

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When I was in third grade, my teacher asked me to write a Chanukah play to be presented along with a Christmas play for the kids in my class. I am not sure how she identified me as a writer. Perhaps we wrote stories for class and she liked mine. How did I even know … Continue reading →

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 On Finding Deep Power

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What have writers shared about unleashing one?s best and most insightful creative work? G. Lynn Nelson, a professor of English at Arizona State University believes we must undo some of what we have been taught about language and use language in our journals as it was once used-to evoke mystery. In Writing and Being: Taking … Continue reading →

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Continuing: A Short Study of Writing Memoir As an Accumulation of Short Pieces

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It may seem hard to imagine how to write a life in short pieces rather than with a more traditional narrative arc, but it works. Here are excerpts from memoirs-made-of-pieces that I like very much: Excerpts from Abigail Thomas’ What Comes Next and How to Like It. Excerpt from Kim Stafford’s 100 Tricks Any Boy Can Do: … Continue reading →

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A Three-Part Study Guide to Writing Short Memoir

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Part One To get a feel for short memoir, you might enjoy reading from Writers’ Digest magazine’s column called “5-Minute Memoir.”  Here are links to a few of the columns: Writing from the Mat Hidden in Plain Sight The Beauty of Bones Here is a column I wrote for the October 2012 issue: Writing Grief … Continue reading →

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“Grave Matters”: Mary Ann Payne’s Writing Exercise Result

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I am pleased to share long-time Writing It Real member Mary Ann Payne?s writing in response to the writing exercise I shared last week. Grave Mattersby Mary Ann Payne It?s time to bury the piano. Chop it up in tiny pieces and put it in a deep hole in the backyard next to the cement … Continue reading →

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What’s the Writer’s Job? Getting Going and Keeping on Going

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When I teach in person, people sometimes show up having purchased a copy of the recently updated edition of my first instructional book on writing: Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down, which I co-authored with Christi Killien Glover. Their interest prompts me to include exercises from that book during our class time together. This week, I’d like to … Continue reading →

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Finding Starts in Personal Essay Writing: Part 3

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Mining the Three Freewrites: Whether you have done these freewrites ( see Part 1 and Part 2) ?in the course of one writing session or over several days, find out what the freewrites have to tell you about an essay you might write by combing through them and jotting down images and phrases that interest … Continue reading →

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Acknowledging the Value of Your Writing: Exercises for Week One and Two of Four

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I have been teaching a class called “Writing is a Friend with Extraordinary Benefits” for a couple of years now through Women on Writing. I have been extremely engaged in what my students write and thrilled by the evidence that by writing from certain models the writers have reaffirmed their belief in the value of writing. After … Continue reading →

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Why I Want to Write

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[Editor’s note: Sometimes I teach a class for Women on Writing that I call “Writing is a Friend with Extraordinary Benefits.” The following essay by Katherine Clarke is reprinted with permission of the author, is an example of what happens in this class — one writer’s words offering extraordinary benefits for each of us who write.] Like many people … Continue reading →

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A Passion for Writing Might Save Us in These Times

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What are we writers to do in a nation where so many young and old seem to have gone mad, publically shouting and bullying, using crude names for those of the female sex and for people of non-Christian religions and for people of color — here in a country where over decades we?ve: Passed legislation … Continue reading →

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If You Want to Write…

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This week, Judy Reeves, author of the new book, Wild Women, Wild Voices, shares her thoughts on writing practice. Here article serves as a good review for all of us who are busy concentrating on revising and publishing and may have begun to overlook the idea of what a writing practice is and offers. She … Continue reading →

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How a Personal Essay Becomes Fully Manifest

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Betty Shafer asked me to read an essay about losing her adult son. It had been a year since she began the essay following an emotional author reading I gave at the Colorado Mountain Writer’s Conference she attended in June 2001. Wishing to include memories about her son John in a book she was making … Continue reading →

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A Lesson About the Value of Writing from Henrik Ibsen’s Play Peer Gynt

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Flying home from Scandinavia in late August, a little uncomfortable in the cramped airline seat, I was remembering stretching my legs on a trip I’d made to Norway years before. That time, I accompanied my daughter to a linguistics conference. She was still nursing her second baby, and she wanted to take him with her … Continue reading →

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On Writing Personal Essays: Rest Assured, It’s More Than “Only” the Personal

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As personal essayists, we sometimes worry whether people will be interested in what we have to say since our material is “just” personal experience. That worry exists alongside its cousins “Who am I to write about this or to tell my family’s secrets?” and “What if my experience rubs people the wrong way and is judged harshly by others, especially people … Continue reading →

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Interview with Memoirist Sue William Silverman

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I am pleased to publish this interview with award winning memoirist Sue William Silverman about the writing of her newest memoir and her advice to those of us who write from personal experience. The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, follows two earlier memoirs, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I … Continue reading →

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Digesting World News

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This essay originally appeared in Writing It Real August 2006. The question I was exploring is still one many of us ask when we consider the world’s situation: Where is our writing in all this? How should it matter? Every time I open my computer, I look at the upper right-hand corner of the screen to … Continue reading →

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People Who Write — Sandra Hurtes’ Story of Blog to Book

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Sandra Hurtes created a blog, felt she had a book there, and engaged in the process of selecting and shaping the entries and adding to the material to create a book-length account of herself as writer.  The result is the very recently published The Ambivalent Memoirist: Obesessions, Digressions, Epiphanies, which has already garnered praise and … Continue reading →

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Create the Mother Lode: Exercises for Short Writing That Leads to More Writing

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[This excerpt appear in slightly different form in the anthology Women Writing On Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing, edited by Carol Smallwood and Suzann Holland.] Even when life seems too busy to “really” write, you can work on gathering and storing images, details, and reflections about family life, personal experiences and memories. The brief … Continue reading →

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Writing Important Life Occasions

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Our lives present us with births, deaths, marriages, anniversaries, and other beginnings and endings. The following prompts excerpted from A Year in the Life: Journaling For Self-Discovery can help us focus our attention on our joy or grief and keep us from the stumbling block of thinking too hard instead of just writing for awhile. Birthdays … Continue reading →

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In May I Rush to Use Sensory Details

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As adults, we are so used to summarizing and editorializing. We have learned that abstractions are considered “smart” in writing and having opinions makes us sound even smarter. That’s what our teachers wanted from us on papers and on essay tests. But creative writing, whether that is in poetry, fiction, personal essay or in longer … Continue reading →

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Taking Chances

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After years of writing, editing, publishing authors and teaching, Jack Heffron knows why we get stuck and how to work around that and back into our material. He’ll be teaching with Meg Files and Sheila Bender at our Writing It Real in Nashville April 25-28 conference. Join us for a chance to work with Jack as … Continue reading →

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A Children’s Book From the Heart: Interview with Penny Holland

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Creating stories to delight children and help them understand sophisticated social concepts is a primary objective of children’s book authors. But it is often hard to cut to the essence of situations in language children understand. Penny Claire Holland had the story for a children’s picture book many years ago, but let her manuscript sit … Continue reading →

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The Third Law of Motion – An Interview with Meg Files

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This week’s interview is with my colleague Meg Files about her process for writing The Third Law of Motion, her newest novel and the book’s impact on its audience. You can study with Meg at our April Writing It Real conference in Nashville or our June Centrum Creative weekend intensive in Port Townsend, WA. Sheila Your … Continue reading →

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Four Tricks that Keep a Writer Going

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Don’t Think. Write! Many authors who write about writing say, “Don’t think. Write!” I am one of them. But I also think it is fair to say to those who write, “Don’t think. Play!” If you allow yourself to play when you come to the page, you are more likely to create a unique world … Continue reading →

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