Writing books and classes are really fond of writing exercises, especially the ones that are intended for classroom use. I hated them for years—to me, they always seemed like a waste of time. I wanted to be attempting to write pay copy, even if my “pay copy”
Read more →A long time ago, I attended a workshop in which the presenter asked us to write a one-page description of our ideal day. I couldn’t do it. I don’t have one “ideal” day that I’d be happy to repeat over and over—no matter how good a day
Read more →For a very long time, I thought (and I’ve said here) that I hated writing exercises and writing prompts. Then I started talking to people about writing, and some of them demanded that I give them exercises. After much thought, I came to the obvious conclusion that
Read more →Nanowrimo started yesterday. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last seventeen years, Nanowrimo is short for National Novel Writing Month, a writer’s challenge that started in 1999 with the idea of writing a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and 11:59 on November
Read more →Points of Departure is now for sale! As you can see, we have made the leap to a new host for the web site. There are still a few problems shaking out, so new posts may suffer from odd timing for a few weeks, but I am
Read more →When I was in high school, one of the rituals that came along during senior year was called something like Career Inventory Day, when you spent the morning taking a battery of tests that was supposed to tell you what career you were most likely to be
Read more →One of the things about writing is that if you want to improve, you have to work at it yourself. Nobody is going to make you practice; nobody is going to force you to get better. Even taking writing classes is a choice – I’ve known people
Read more →Having gone on and on about how much I dislike writing exercises, I’m now going to talk a bit about how and when I think they’re useful. That would be mainly as very specific, targeted ways of addressing particular problems or writing skills that aren’t as developed
Read more →Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a sewing class for beginners. In the first class, they showed us how to work the sewing machines and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could see
Read more →Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a summer sewing class. On the first day, they showed everybody how to work the sewing machine and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could learn how to
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