Creative Writing Practice by Deborah Lyn Stanley
At a loss for story ideas? How about randomness to boost you into new patterns of ideas?
1. Open a book to any page, choose a word from the first sentence.
2. Open another page in the same book and choose a word from that first sentence.
3. Put your two words together — imagine a story or a poem.
Today, we’ll look at two creative writing strategies.
First:
Writeriffic II written by Eva Shaw
Following a class through www.ed2go.com, I purchased Writeriffic II to continue creative writing studies, increase my self-confidence, and to find my writer's voice.
It is a great little book full of gems and encouragements throughout Chapters 1-19. Then practice follows with creativity assignments in Chapters 20-54—assignments designed for fun, taking risks and writing creatively.
Via Assignment #21, I wrote a fun story choosing Cinderella and Robin Hood as my protagonist duo. I added 10 words found in the dictionary—words new to me, ones I don’t commonly use.
It’s fun—try it!
https://evashaw.com/writeriffic-ii-creativity-training-for-writers/
Second:
Writing the Wave by Elizabeth Ayres
Elizabeth presents her creativity formula for building original creative writing projects through fun steps to gather story ideas.
As you work through the book, as I am, you will become aware of various techniques to generate raw writing material in layers. You will use boxes, lists, circles, step by step.
Then focus on our viewpoint choice and use it to launch into character descriptions. Thus, we’ll have raw material with potential.
As we travel though the book, we identify the main idea and develop it in an organized fashion with structure in Part 2.
With our piece in progress, we move on to Part 3 and troubleshooting the issues that have come up in the usual course of a project. Polish the work by adding life and strength to our text and expressions.
Creative writing with Elizabeth Ayres is a different way of working to generate new material, whether it is articles, stories, essays or books. Elizabeth teaches a step by step; don’t skip ahead method. Sometimes her language and approach seem like a foreign language. Keep traveling, jump but keep going (as I do). There is something to learn that likely will equip for better writing and ideas.
https://www.creativewritingcenter.com/about
Good practice points for a satisfying writing life:
• Don’t wait for inspiration. Do something you love, play, it will spark ideas.
• Set aside your best time to write for 20-30 minutes, make it an appointment and keep it.
• Let go of perfectionism! It defeats playfulness.
• Change things up—write by hand, write on scraps of paper, be messy, break the rules, do whatever works to stay playful!
• Forget mistakes. You can fix them easy enough on the next draft.
Just Write!
Love the Process
Deborah Lyn Stanley is an author of Creative Non-Fiction. She writes articles, essays and stories. She is passionate about caring for the mentally impaired through creative arts.
Visit her My Writer’s Life website at: https://deborahlynwriter.com/
Visit her caregiver’s website: https://deborahlyncaregiver.com/
Mom & Me: A Story of Dementia and the Power of God’s Love is available:
https://www.amazon.com/Deborah-Lyn-Stanley/
& https://books2read.com/b/valuestories
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4 comments:
Deborah, love this article, especially the idea of using a word from the first sentence from one page in a book, and then do the same thing on another page in the same book.
That's got to be a fun and interesting exercise!
Deborah Lyn,
Thank you for this interesting article. I loved hearing the value you got from Eva Shaw (who I've known many years but notd seen in a while). I loved seeing her name again. Keep up the wonderful effort.
Terry
Great! From writing prompts to suggested reading.
Best,
Carolyn Howard -Johnson
Thanks much all - glad you liked my article, it was fun to write.
Wonderful you know Eva Shaw, Terry. She's great!
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