I love this idea! I have been fooling around with poetry and personal essays when I need some inspiration to finish up my screenplay. I can give myself permission to shift from project to project intentionally and still get some work done. ❤️
“Think of your book as an entrée and your short project as a palate cleanser.”
This is a very accessible perspective. I think poetry writing is helpful on many levels. It not only primes the creative juices, it gives your other writing more beauty, allows the packing of a sentence with rich imagery.
I actually enjoy prompts because I may have some version of writer’s ADD. I can immediately jump like a squirrel onto a quick prompt and be off to the races.
Thanks, Meta for a wonderful prescription for approaching writer’s block.
I vibe with this so much. When I had trouble writing fiction, I started journaling. When I formulated the idea for my newsletter, I thought, why not do both memoir posts and fantasy posts? Why put myself in a box? I have things to say, and they come in different genres. :)
I like to think of these things as cross-training. I write essays (including my monthly Substack newsletters) and see these as a chance to work a different creative muscle. I also look to other art forms in that way, too, with my current instrument of choice being the mandolin. Granted, no one is ever going to pay me for my mandolin playing, but, like the essays I hope to place sometimes, even that helps with the larger project of novel-writing simply by offering an outlet in a different creative form.
Hi Meta. We're in rhythm. One of my pieces of advice in tomorrow's Friday article is going to be to work on something else if you're stuck on your main project.
I write historical novels and assumed that was what I could do. Then I enrolled in a spiritual writing workshop and discovered I could write wonderful short pieces - pieces that were poetic, intensely moving and spiritual all at once. The secret to this success was that I hated writing to a prompt ("you're not the boss of me!" as my once two-year-old used to say) and I did everything I could think of to subvert the process. I don't know if the leader of the workshop appreciated that, but so it goes.
The experience was amazing, and I subsequently led a workshop myself to allow others to explore in the same way. Oddly enough, the members of my workshop didn't follow the prompts either. It must be a thing.
I love this idea! I have been fooling around with poetry and personal essays when I need some inspiration to finish up my screenplay. I can give myself permission to shift from project to project intentionally and still get some work done. ❤️
“Think of your book as an entrée and your short project as a palate cleanser.”
This is a very accessible perspective. I think poetry writing is helpful on many levels. It not only primes the creative juices, it gives your other writing more beauty, allows the packing of a sentence with rich imagery.
I actually enjoy prompts because I may have some version of writer’s ADD. I can immediately jump like a squirrel onto a quick prompt and be off to the races.
Thanks, Meta for a wonderful prescription for approaching writer’s block.
I vibe with this so much. When I had trouble writing fiction, I started journaling. When I formulated the idea for my newsletter, I thought, why not do both memoir posts and fantasy posts? Why put myself in a box? I have things to say, and they come in different genres. :)
Mes apologies to Roxane Gay, whose name I originally misspelled. You'd think with a name like Meta, I'd be more attentive! It's corrected now!!
I like to think of these things as cross-training. I write essays (including my monthly Substack newsletters) and see these as a chance to work a different creative muscle. I also look to other art forms in that way, too, with my current instrument of choice being the mandolin. Granted, no one is ever going to pay me for my mandolin playing, but, like the essays I hope to place sometimes, even that helps with the larger project of novel-writing simply by offering an outlet in a different creative form.
Hi Meta. We're in rhythm. One of my pieces of advice in tomorrow's Friday article is going to be to work on something else if you're stuck on your main project.
I write historical novels and assumed that was what I could do. Then I enrolled in a spiritual writing workshop and discovered I could write wonderful short pieces - pieces that were poetic, intensely moving and spiritual all at once. The secret to this success was that I hated writing to a prompt ("you're not the boss of me!" as my once two-year-old used to say) and I did everything I could think of to subvert the process. I don't know if the leader of the workshop appreciated that, but so it goes.
The experience was amazing, and I subsequently led a workshop myself to allow others to explore in the same way. Oddly enough, the members of my workshop didn't follow the prompts either. It must be a thing.