We’re five days into NaNoWriMo. Have you written every day? Have you found your protagonist? Have you established conflict? Try this: Today’s NaNoWriMo Exercise: Not All Bad, an Exercise in Character & Complexity Write about a terrible deed from the point of view of someone who doesn’t find the deed objectionable. Why: literature, like life,…Continue reading NaNoWriMo Writing Prompts Week One
Category: Writing Exercises
Which would you choose?
I recently came across an interesting exercise, in which you are asked to read a paragraph about two very different sorts of lives, and choose which one you would prefer to live. Choice one: the world adores you and bows to you, and all is beautiful, comfortable, and glorious…with a catch. In the other, you…Continue reading Which would you choose?
The Power of Images
The Year of Fog gets a mention today in the Knoxville News-Sentinel. Book reviewer Ina Hughes contemplates the nature of images in Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s book I Am a Strange Loop, now out in paperback from Basic Books. Hughes calls I Am A Strange Loop “a fascinating, lay-friendly book about the workings of…Continue reading The Power of Images
Belle graffiti
I found this photograph by J. Wilson while doing an internet search for JFG Coffee Company–a major olfactory memory from my days in Knoxville, TN, in the early nineties. The unsigned drawing, which appears on a yet-to-be-renovated building off Market Square in Knoxville’s Old City, takes graffiti art to a new level. . What is…Continue reading Belle graffiti
Eating Alabama
Through the Alabama Writers’ Forum newsletter, I just discovered a great blog called Eating Alabama. Yesterday at the Gustafer Yellowgold syphony performance in San Francisco, inspired music man Morgan Taylor (you gotta see the show if it’s in your town) joked about how all the kids in San Francisco probably count “quinoa noodles and soy…Continue reading Eating Alabama