Tag: writing process
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Mary Amato’s Tips for Teachers: How to Encourage Creative Writing
Children have a lot of writing assignments in school. Often, time for creative writing is squeezed out of the curriculum. If you are a teacher who wants to introduce/encourage more creative writing, here are some ideas. Keep a Writer’s Notebook. See my Tips for Keeping a Writer’s Notebook for more info. Create a Writer’s Corner.…
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Getting Out of the Way
“I don’t know [expletive] about words. The reason the language comes out that way is, it’s me just trying to get out of the way.” This provocative quote from Irish playwright Enda Kenny (from a recent Washington Post article by Peter Marks) speaks to an important concept that I am continually stressing to students. Writing…
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What is the Weirdest Thing?
When Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and editor-in-chief of One Story Magazine, gets bored writing, she doesn’t ask, “What happens next?” She asks herself this question: “What’s the weirdest thing that can happen right now?” At this year’s AWP conference, Tinti said that you don’t want weirdness for the sake of weirdness, but…
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The Writer’s Notebook: Don’t Leave Home Without It!
“Inside Sedaris’s left shirt pocket, he keeps an omnipresent notebook, a little spiral-bound one, in which he writes down everything that happens that might later be of use. If he walks out of the house and realizes he’s forgotten it, he turns around and goes home. “I might see a worm attacking a centipede. I…
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The Need for Obstacles
One of the recurring problems I see when I’m critiquing a story is the lack of an obstacle or nemesis. William Gibson calls it “the barrier” in his excellent book about writing titled Shakespeare’s Game. Something must get in the way of the main character’s yearning or else there is no tension and ultimately no…
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Learning from a Master
Let’s say you’re reading a book, and you come across a sentence that blows you away because of its poetry or cadence or economy or expansiveness. Mark it. Then at some point, come back and don’t just read it again. Write that sentence down in your writer’s notebook, word for word, comma for comma. In…
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What did I learn?
If you want to learn something, one of the best ways to do it is to be conscious of what you are learning. That may sound ridiculously obvious, but life has a way of flooding the mind with too much information and sweeping the newly-learned or almost-learned stuff out to sea. The best way for…
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How to Read a Novel
One of the students in my Fiction for Young Readers class asked what she should focus on when she’s reading the novels I assigned. First of all, I read for enjoyment, of course; but I do analyze books as I read, and I do it on two basic levels. Think of a house. You’ve got…
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How to Hear a Character’s Voice
Youtube link for video.https://youtu.be/MKSPVcFP6U8 Teachers, if you can’t access youtube, try teachertube.
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Writing Edgar Allan’s Official Crime Investigation Notebook
Teachers if you can’t access youtube, please see teachertube.