Day 36: Pretend MFA
There seems to have been some confusion about the last post I wrote. We did not, for instance, get another dog, nor did we (would we) name her Dolly Parton,…
May 18, 2018
Weekly Writing Prompts March 20-31
posted March 30, 2016
Daily Prompt #20 “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”– William Butler Yeats
Daily prompt #21 “Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?” -Joan Didion
Daily prompt #22 “Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”-Joan Didion
Daily Prompt #23
#dailyprompt 24 If you are inclined to feel guilty for writing fiction instead of, say registering voters, or simply planting a garden; or if you are the kind of person who sweats beads of guilt for all the electricity your computer steals from the planet in order to write that novel, consider this: “Realistic fiction, for its part, may expand readers’ circle of empathy by seducing them into thinking and feeling like people very different from themselves…Reading novels about characters unlike oneself exercises the ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes, which turns one against cruel punishments and other abuses of human rights…[think Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Nicholas Nickleby, The Grapes of Wrath…]” -from Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
#dailyprompt 25 “Basically, here’s my advice: take time.
In your life, you may always feel as if you don’t have enough time. Adults are specialists at feeling that. Strangely, writing seems to give us a deeper sense of our own time and time in general.
What do we need? A quiet minute, a pencil, a page. Please be kind to yourself when you write. Don’t expect you will love everything that comes out–let many things come out, and know that now and then you will like a line or a phrase enough to carry you away. Don’t be stingy!
No one can predict what will happen when you start paying attention, enjoying your own words on the page. But I can promise you one thing: whatever you do in your life, whatever path you follow, if you are a person who is comfortable writing your own words down, you will have an easier, better time of everything….Language will befriend you in ways you cannot guess…and YOU will always have someone to talk to–yourself.”-Naomi Shihab Nye
#dailyprompt 26 Best kick-in-the-pants/comforting advice I’ve heard/seen in a long time!
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