Formal writing courses are, of course, incredible experiences, but I think there’s also something to be said for self-taught craft. That is, putting together your own curriculum to explore during your writing-adjacent time, especially for those of us who aren’t in a position to go back to school. Even if you attend an MFA or regularly get into prestigious workshops, those experiences will take up only a fraction of your life. Are you really not going to learn more and stretch the boundaries and capacity of your writing talent in the off years?
What follows is a bit of advice on building a self-taught writing curriculum, which is then rounded out by a bulleted list of resources I’ve found useful in my own writing life and the lives of my writing friends and clients. I hope it’ll help you, too.
Read MoreReading is largely a disembodied experience, so when we are reminded out of the blue that we have bodies—by the thing doing our disembodying, no less—the result makes our immersion in the work all the stronger.
Take the challenge. Dial up your readers’ emotional investment in your work with embodied language.
Read MoreLife can be heavy sometimes, but you can’t beat yourself up about not showing up at the writing desk. In these instances, it’s not a lack of motivation but a lack of resources that’s keeping you from moving forward. If you get mad at yourself for that, it’d be like getting mad at your car for not moving forward if it ran out of gas. This post includes five things you can do when writing doesn’t come easily.
Read MoreI'm a big fan of drawing ekphrastic inspiration from other art forms to inform my own creative writing, and in a stroke of luck (though maybe not for my husband), I recently rediscovered some of my teenage musical theater obsessions. As such, I thought I'd bring up one of my favorite elements to borrow from the world of music—the leitmotif.
Read MoreInstead of forcing my brain to create a lackluster and possibly unconvincing beat sheet, I took my solution straight from the pages of the Player’s Handbook (Fifth Edition) and made all characters involved “roll for it.”
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