Four times a year, Kevin has to go to a shooting range and play cowboy–one of the mandatory aspects of his job. Sometimes the shooting is indoors and fairly straightforward. Sometimes it’s outdoors, with moving targets that are made to look like an assortment of criminals alongside mothers holding babies, and you have to shoot…Continue reading upholding the minimum
Category: Writing Exercises
Why Geology Is Better Than Fiction
Inside Mt. Saint Helens, a fin-shaped wedge of rock is growing skyward at the rate of four to five feet per day. The rock began emerging in November, and it hasn’t stopped since. The exercise: Write about a strange natural phenomenon.
Borges on The Thousand and One Nights
Picking up where I left off yesterday, here’s Borges in the essay, “The Thousand and One Nights:” The Thousand and One Nights is not something which has died. It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of memory–and also, now, a part of…Continue reading Borges on The Thousand and One Nights
leaving the safe harbor
“If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.” ~ Thomas Aquinas The exercise: Write a story in which your main character gets his ship out of port.
found texts
Rachel Deahl reports for Publishers Weekly that Slate is launching its new fiction section with a serialized novel by Walter Kirn titled The Unbinding: Kirn’s novel is intended to make inventive use of its format while ruminating on how the Internet shapes our culture. As such, the unfolding story is being presented as a series…Continue reading found texts