Archives For practice

30 Days of Small, Sustainable Changes

July 2, 2011 — 5 Comments

Thirty days hath September…

All the rest have 31.

July 2 calendar pageThat leaves 30 days left in July, the perfect opportunity to think about this short TED Talk by Matt Cutts urging us to make “small, sustainable changes” 30 days at a time:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnfBXjWm7hc]

What can we do for the rest of the month?

  • Write for ten minutes (longhand, on an e-tablet, whatever) before checking email or going online each morning. Do it for 30 days.
  • Read for 15 minutes after supper or before bed or when the kids are in bed. Do it for 30 days.
  • At lunchtime, do writing prompts or exercises from your favorite writing guidebook. Do it for 30 days.
  • Read the daily Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, and commit a few lines to memory or write a short poem in response. Do it for 30 days.
  • Write in a quotation journal a sentence you have read or overheard that is meaningful to you. Do it for 30 days.
  • Send a handwritten postcard or letter to someone near or far, just because. Do it for 30 days.
  • Write one page of a chapter or short story. Do it for 30 days.

What are some other ideas?

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Deliberate Practice: Plain and Fancy Words

June 24, 2011 — 10 Comments

It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?” ~ Winnie the Pooh

Wordle cloud

Created with http://www.wordle.net

One of my favorite books when I was in high school wasn’t a novel or a biography or even a narrative of any kind: It was a well-thumbed red paperback of Roget’s Thesaurus.

In hindsight, I used a thesaurus in exactly the way I now tell my students not to use it: I looked for fancy words to replace plain ones. I searched for words that were more capacious, commodious, humongous, substantial, super colossal, tremendous, walloping. In short, longer. The problem is that longer words are often not the words that best convey our meaning, as William Strunk and E.B. White knew so well:

14. Avoid fancy words.

Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo -Saxon words. In this, as in so many matters pertaining to style, one’s ear must be one’s guide: gut is a lustier noun than intestine, but the two words are not interchangeable, because gut is often inappropriate, being too coarse for the context. Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.

If you admire fancy words, if every sky is beauteous, every blonde curvaceous, every intelligent child prodigious, if you are tickled by discombobulate, you will have a bad time with Reminder 14. What is wrong, you ask, with beauteous? No one knows, for sure. There is nothing wrong, really, with any word all are good, but some are better than others. A matter of ear, a matter of reading the books that sharpen the ear. The Elements of Style

There was another, less pedantic reason I loved that thesaurus, though. I enjoyed scanning lists of words, learning new ones, seeing them play off one another and hearing them in my head.

While misuse of a thesaurus can produce graceless and insincere writing, wise use can lead to greater precision, variety, and depth.

Here are a few deliberate writing practice ideas for honing your “plain and fancy”word skills.

1. Use a thesaurus when the word you are using isn’t quite right. For example, if you are trying to describe how a character is worried or how you are worried about something, but worried seems too broad, a thesaurus can help you to hone your meaning to apprehensive, disturbed, fearful, on edge, tormented, or uneasy.

2. Look up the derivations of synonyms for a common word to see and hear the difference in tone between Anglo-Saxon and Latin roots (www.dictionary.reference.com allows you to switch easily between a dictionary and a thesaurus for this exercise). For example:

TALL

Origin:
before 1000; Middle English:  big, bold, comely, proper, ready, Old English getæl  (plural getale ) quick, ready, competent; cognate with Old High German gizal  quick

ELEVATED

Origin:
1490–1500;  < Latin ēlevātus  lightened, lifted up (past participle of ēlevāre )

3. Think of whether your characters would use plain or fancy words, and use a thesaurus to differentiate their speech so as to suggest their personalities.

4. Choose a passage by a favorite author to rewrite, using a thesaurus to change the tone. For example, replace the stricken words of the beginning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to experiment with tone and style:

THE BOY WHO LIVED.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.

5. Take a paragraph of your own and analyze it based on plain or fancy words, word derivations, and conscious use of precision for each and every word choice.

Do you use a thesaurus and, if so, how?

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Deliberate Practice: Willa Cather’s Tantalizing Opening Paragraphs

June 16, 2011 — 6 Comments

Deliberate Practice Practice Practice

Jane asked in a comment to a recent post about deliberate practice, “As a beginning writer, may I request, when you have time, a post listing techniques to be addressed?”

Scott H. Young has written an excellent piece on Ericsson’s research and the idea of writing practice for mastery: Getting Good: How I’m Trying To Be a Better Writer. He offers several ideas from his own experience of how one can develop a plan to practice writing so as to reach one’s personal goals.

As I’ve been thinking about techniques that writers can practice deliberately—sentence variety, paragraph structures, concrete vs. abstract words, style and voice, satisfying conclusions, so many more—I realize that it would be good to address them here on a regular basis. This post, then, is the first in a series (weekly, perhaps?) of Deliberate Practice ideas and prompts. Without further ado…

The Tantalizing Power of Opening Paragraphs

When you are in a library or bookstore, how do you choose which books to take home? In addition to checking out the back cover for blurbs from either published authors I admire or prominent book reviews, I usually read the first page or first paragraph, and I know.

But what do I know?

An article by Nick Mamatas in the most recent issue of The Writer discusses how a good first paragraph doesn’t necessarily have the “hook” we’ve been told it must have:

“The start of a story, its first paragraph, should assure the reader that he is in capable hands. The beginning of the story should tantalize, not hook, the reader.”

Some good examples of this come from the novels of one of my favorite writers, Willa Cather, whose writing and life crossed geographical boundaries of personal interest to me and whose prose never fails to stir something deep inside my writer’s soul. For more about Willa Cather’s life and work and why I love her so, read Kathleen Norris’s essay written for American Masters.

Here are examples of how Cather tantalizes rather than hooks the reader in her first paragraphs, how she assures us that we are in capable hands:

My Antonia

I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.  I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska.  I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the “hands” on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather.  Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider than mine.  He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

Song of the Lark

Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug store. Larry, the doctor’s man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-room and the double student’s lamp on the desk in the study. The isinglass sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow, and the air in the study was so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting room was carpeted and stiffly furnished, something like a country parlor. The study had worn, unpainted floors, but there was a look of winter comfort about it. The doctor’s flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the ceiling. It was filled with medical books of every thickness and color. On the top shelf stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark mottled board covers, with imitation leather backs.

O Pioneers!

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o’clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons, shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was quiet, for there would not be another train in until night.

Each of these openings serves a different purpose. The first, from My Antonia, draws us into the voice of the first-person narrator and introduces us in a natural and easy way to his world and circumstances and immediate problem and goal. The second, from Song of the Lark, uses rich detail to paint a portrait of Dr. Howard Archie (notice how we learn he has “a man” but that his books have “imitation leather backs,” how his papers are in “orderly piles” on a “well made” desk, all clues to his character and status). Finally, my favorite, from O Pioneers!, makes the town of Hanover which “was trying not to be blown away” as real and familiar to us as our own back yard.

What they all have in common is an absolute certainty that the story is going somewhere and that the author knows how to take us there. “Take my hand; let’s take a journey,” she seems to say, rather than “Gotcha!”

How can you use your opening paragraph(s) to reassure your readers that you know where you are going and to tantalize her to read further?

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How will you close in on your 10,000 hours today?

June 13, 2011 — 7 Comments

“The people at the top don’t work just harder, or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell

drawing of pencil pusher

Photo Credit: Zsuzsanna Kilian

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell discusses research by K. Anders Ericsson suggesting that expertise and success are far from being just about talent. They are built slowly, from deliberate practice: roughly 10,000 hours worth, the equivalent of four hours per weekday for ten years, two hours for twenty years, and so on.

You might think, Well I’ve certainly written for more than 10,000 hours in my life! Where is my name on the best-seller list?

We may want to reconsider how we are practicing. The authors of Freakonomics, in a New York Times Magazine story on Ericsson’s study, explain:

“Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task—playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.” Read More

Writers can ask themselves this question: Am I doing some writing task today, even if just for an hour, that counts as deliberate practice?

  • Does thinking about writing count? No.
  • Does reading about writing count? No, although it helps in other ways.
  • Does blogging count? Maybe, if we do it with focus and with concentration on technique.
  • Does writing or editing part of a planned work in progress count? Absolutely.

Author Mark Terry puts it bluntly:

“If you want to be a professional writer—fiction or nonfiction or poetry or whatever—you’re going to have to put in the time. You’re going to have to write a lot—a million words, maybe. A lot of it will be crap. A lot of it will never see the light of day. You’ll need to move through ‘familiarity’ to ‘mastery’ and in between those two there’s a fair amount of boredom and frustration.” Read More

Are talent or luck involved at all? Yes, but, let’s face it: We can’t control those factors.

The refreshing aspect of Ericsson’s conclusions is that we can control how hard we work, one hour at a time.

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I Heart Blogs (and writing prompts)

March 21, 2011 — 13 Comments

A couple of blogs to pass along this morning. First, in honor of the first full day of spring,Victoria at liv2write2day has posted a spring writing prompt for poetry or flash fiction. Her own poem in celebration of spring will be certain to awaken your seasonal passions. :)

Also, anyone who loves travel and world cultures and slice-of-life photography should head on over to the blog I Heart Mondegreens this morning for some delightful photos of the author’s favorite things about where she lives. While it’s easy to focus on the potential drawbacks of our plugged-in and online 21st century life, this kind of communication and connection—at once personal and global—is one of its virtues.

About I Heart Mondegreens: “Travel and international food lover. Originally from Los Angeles. Sleepless grad student. Married to D-Man the Spaniard and living in Southern Spain.”

A beautiful blog. Each photo holds the promise of a story and would serve as a terrific writing prompt.

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Good Morning Pages!

January 20, 2011 — 6 Comments

Recently I’ve been feeling rather scattered, not as whole as I do at other times, parts of me—parts of my self—blown here and there without a lot of coherence. So I breathed a small sigh of relief when I read the recent Psychology Today piece “Is Your Brain Like an iPhone?” by Robert Kurzban, author of the new book, Why Everyone (Else) Is A Hypocrite (the article contains a nice literary reference to Walt Whitman, by the way):

“[T]he idea that there are ‘multitudes’ in your mind helps to explain various kinds of inconsistencies. If there’s a lot of applications in your head, then they can be doing different things at the same time; oddly, this means that different applications can have different and contradictory beliefs in them. Further, suppose that, just like a smart phone, different applications are in the foreground or background at different times. If behavior depends on which applications are currently active, then individuals can seem to be very different people at different times, depending on all the details of which modules are currently active.” Read More

While the article reassures me that my scattered self is not necessarily a sign of approaching senility or lack of a meaningful integrity, I still want to feel more whole, more solid, less like a collection of apps and more analog.

That’s where morning pages come in. Recently, Christi Craig posted a link on Facebook to a blog post by Jennifer Blanchard on “The Power of Morning Pages,” and I was reminded of how, when I make Julia Cameron’s creativity tool of daily morning pages a part of my life, I do feel more whole, perhaps because they provide a continuous narrative for my days (regardless of whether I ever read them again), linking one to another in ways I don’t always notice at the time.

What are morning pages? They are a little like freewriting, but with the difference that they don’t need to lead to anything else. They can act as a warm-up to other writing, but they can also exist entirely on their own. To learn more, be sure to read Jennifer’s post. You can also check out an online excerpt from The Artist’s Way, as well as the video below in which Julia Cameron discusses how she uses morning pages in her life and why it is important to write them in longhand. Her description of morning pages:

“It’s like you’re taking a little whisk broom to all the corners of your consciousness, and you’re sort of whisking ‘this is what I’m thinking about, this is what I’m thinking about.’ It’s as if you’re saying to the universe ‘This is what I like, this is what I don’t like, this is what I want more of, this is what I want less of.’ And the universe tends to cooperate with what you spell out in your pages.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpDcrAVqIco]

Morning pages, here I come! I’m happy to be whisking again.

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Creative Inspiration: Felicia Day, Mad Men, and Create a Scene Tuesday

August 2, 2010 — Leave a comment

You know how, every once in awhile, you need some inspiration for your creativity? I’ve been in one of those places recently. Fortunately, there are a lot of creative folks out there who have inspiration to spare. Check these out:

1. Felicia Day

Joss Whedon fans will enjoy Douglas Eby’s piece on Felicia Day (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog) and how she turned being “creatively bored” into her latest project, The Guild. The article includes this video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy5D1J4JbuM]

Felicia also has an extremely fun website. Believe me, this creative and energetic woman will inspire even the couchiest of potatoes!

2. Young Adult Novel: Mad Men Style!

Associate Literary Agent Bree Ogden is issuing a challenge on her blog to writers to give her a Mad Men style young adult manuscript:

“I would L.O.V.E a manuscript in the YA category that explores that time period. I know it has been done before. It’s not like I am asking for anything hugely unique. But I want it like Mad Men. I want it dry. I want it cold and hard. I want it real and unabashed.”

I’m getting ready to watch last night’s new Mad Men episode in about 15 minutes, so I am definitely inspired!

3. Create a Scene with a Witch

At Ketch Tavern, Kelsey Ketch has announced this week’s topics for her “Create a Scene Tuesday” series. How will you write about a witch casting her first spell in a school setting? Let’s share our creations on Kelsey’s blog tomorrow!

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Ordinary Writing: Will Our Grandchildren Want To Frame Our Emails?

July 2, 2010 — 2 Comments

My husband and I recently saw an episode of Mad Men in which the Sterling Cooper creative team is trying to find a way to advertise Western Union telegrams at a time of widespread telephone use. The episode, “The Color Blue,” contains several references to writing’s value—Paul “loses” an idea because he doesn’t write it down, for example, and the evidence Betty finds in Don’s desk is a jumble of documents and photos with handwritten captions—so it’s no surprise that the “aha” idea to pitch telegrams has to do with the relative permanence of the written word.

“You can’t frame a telephone call,” Don says.

Telegrams were not handwritten; however, they were unique. There was one copy. It was hand-delivered. It was a kind of missing link between an age of frequent handwritten correspondence and today’s emails and texting.

What are we leaving for others to find or to frame? What personal words have you written today, not as an email or text message, but with your own hand or, at least, as a printed document that you intend to keep?

I’ve been asking myself these questions as I work to transcribe diaries kept from my great aunt Hattie. She wrote daily from 1920 through most of 1957. Every day, without exception, she dutifully recorded the weather, the day’s work and travels, her and her husband’s health, and any goings on in the neighborhood to which she was privy. Some of the entries are only three or four lines in length, kept in composition notebooks or hard-bound ledgers. Others are full-page accounts that include such details as waving to her brother and nephews who were cutting wood as she drove by, or the subtle changes in the weather when the wind shifts at noon.

These kinds of entries are what Jennifer Sinor in The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary calls ordinary writing: “Ordinary writing, writing that is typically unseen or ignored, is primarily defined by its status as discardable.” Ordinary writing is divorced from a broader context. It is often repetitious, even tedious. It is writing that “does not tell a story …. does not mark an event or narrate an idea” (pp. 5-6).

Without her diaries, Hattie would be relegated to a line on a family tree, a name only. Yet, as I type Hattie’s life into a Word document day by day, they do slowly shape themselves into a story, a person whom I feel I know, who sits beside me as I work. I was born eight years after she died, so I have no memories to go by, only her own words. It has taken me months to become well enough acquainted with her handwriting to transcribe the entries quickly, and just as long to learn to be not only unfazed by but thankful for her inconsistent and uncommon spellings and her short-cut sentences that sometimes omit articles or verbs (“Louise to school”). I am grateful that these pages were not discarded, that they somehow survived and found their way into my hands, and that I have a chance to know the extraordinariness of an otherwise ordinary woman who was also a writer.

As a recent post on “Once Upon a Blog” puts it, “You never know when those few lines you scribbled a few years ago will inspire something wonderful. I believe ideas need to steep, find other ingredients, and brew a bit before the next bestseller can be written.”

1886 Letter: My dear son Edward,
Many thanks for your kind letter. I was very glad to hear from you once more and greatly surprised to hear that you were married and had a family….

For my father’s birthday present two years ago, I framed some of Hattie’s photos and captions she had written for them. Her captions—otherwise ordinary writing—were frame-worthy precisely because of the personal touch of her hand. I think of the letter my family has, sent from my great-great–grandmother in Woodhull, New York, to her son in Dakota Territory in 1886, and how grateful I am that she sent it and that it has survived.

I am no Luddite. I do not take for granted the ease of modern technology, the speed and green advantage of electronic communication, nor the liberating aspects, especially for a working writer, of being able to cut, paste, save as, delete, and revise without rewriting by hand or retyping entire manuscripts.

At the same time, I sometimes ask myself, will anyone want to frame our emails? Would we want to read The Complete Text Messages of John and Abigail Adams?

“I love getting telegrams, but I never send them.” ~ Ken Cosgrove, Mad Men

This year, our family is planning an 80th birthday celebration for my father. Yesterday I sent the invitations, and, while the cards came hot off my printer, I resisted the urge to use address labels for the guests. Handwritten addresses might not be much, but it’s something. As I wrote each name and street, city and zip code, I thought of the person who would receive the invitation in a day or two. So much better than pressing a self-adhesive label on an envelope.

I do not want to return to the past, nor do I have the answers to these questions or a crystal ball. All I know is that these days I’m more aware of my own ordinary writing, and I’m doing just a little more of it with pen and paper.

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Writing Prompts, Exercises, and Practice

June 28, 2010 — 1 Comment

“Talent is the desire to practice.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell

“To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.” ~ Natalie Goldberg

Would you ever enter a marathon without first beginning a cardiovascular and strength training routine?

Would you ever say that “someday, when you have enough time” you will play all of Chopin’s etudes, without also planning to learn and practice scales and otherwise work on your musical training?

If these scenarios sound ludicrous, consider how often we plunge into writing a play or a novel or a collection of poetry without also adding writing exercise to our routine (and then we wonder why we run out of steam early on). Or how often, when we tell others that we are writers, the response we hear is, “Oh, I plan to write a novel someday, when I have the time,” as if good writing needs no prior preparation or training, no work or practice.

For me, adding regular writing exercises or practice to my daily routine makes a huge difference in how much and how well I write. Making the time for ten or fifteen minutes of warm-up exercises before I dive into my current project is no different from beginning a physical workout with carefully chosen stretches, or starting a piano practice session by running through a progression of chords.

So, why do we so often resist this important part of our writing?

Perhaps it’s because we often view good writing as somehow “magical,” that it happens for no discernible reason, or that it comes from an unseen muse. After all, we can hear musicians play those scales. We watch athletes stretch their calves and shoulders. All we see writers do is scribble away on a piece of paper or tap on a keyboard. Just what are they doing, anyway?? Demystifying the vocation and process of writing often is the first step, for many writers, in finally realizing their goals and making writing a regular part of their life.

Are you interested in adding some writing prompts, exercises, or practice to your routine? Here are some definitions and resources to inform and inspire:

Writing Prompts are simply short textual or visual jumpstarts that give you an idea for what to write about. A textual prompt might be something like “It’s July 28th in the year 2020. Where are you and what are you doing?” See examples of online prompts at The One-Minute Writer and The Write Prompts. Photos also make terrific visual writing prompts.

I’ve used prompts often when I’ve led writing classes or workshops, especially as a way to initiate in-class freewriting at the beginning of a session. They are also good for overcoming temporary writer’s block and finding topics for blog or journal entries. For example, National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) gives bloggers daily ideas and motivation for what to post. You can browse the site as an unregistered reader or sign up to join “a group of people who have committed to updating their blogs once a day for an entire month.” Take a look at the daily prompts and writing prompt suggestions by readers. Also, check out Plinky. You don’t have to be a blogger to benefit from Plinky’s weekday writing prompts, but if you do have a WordPress.com blog, you can set up your Plinky account to post to your blog. WordPress.com also offers daily writing topics at The Daily Post.

Writing exercises are like musical scales and chords, or specific stretches or strength training exercises designed to improve a technique or skill. Whereas prompts are usually unconnected to your current project or goals, writing exercises are often chosen precisely because they help you to strengthen specific areas of your writing. For examples, see Writing Exercises for Creative Fiction Writers from the University of Iowa, or Three Science Fiction Writing Exercises. Writing exercises often also include prompts.

If you want writing exercises that target more specific writing skills, such as punctuation or paraphrasing, be sure to bookmark Purdue’s Online Writing Lab’s OWL Writing Exercises.

Finally, writing practice occurs when we consciously add routine and meaning to our writing, regardless of whether we write professionally or for our eyes only. One of the best books on this subject is Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. It was one of the first books on writing I ever read, and I’ve read individual chapters more times than I have fingers to count.

Writing Down the Bones is about not just practicing writing so as to become a better writer, in the sense of the Malcolm Gladwell quotation above, but also making writing our practice, in the sense of disciplining the mind, or, in her words, “as a way to penetrate your life and become sane.”

You can read an excerpt from the expanded edition, where Natalie writes that her wish is for writing students to “come to know themselves, feel joy in expression, trust what they think. Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are and you’re free.” She continues,

“Believe me, you too, can find your place inside the huge terrain of writing. No one is so odd as to be left out.

Now, please, go. Write your asses off.”

For more information about Natalie Goldberg, visit her website and watch this video where she talks about her book Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e17SIiSRIwY]

What are you waiting for? Begin the week by working up some writing sweat!

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