The assignment for Day 5 includes the following: Prompt: fog Form: elegy Device: metaphor Elegy Originally requiring specific meters, nowadays elegies come in all shapes and sizes, though they are united by their (often melancholic) focus on loss and longing. As much as it can mourn something that’s gone forever, it can also celebrate it. […]
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The Day 4 assignment offers these challenges: Prompt: animal Form: concrete poetry Device: enjambment Concrete Poetry Also known as shape poetry, the idea here is to arrange your words on the screen (or the page) so that they create a shape or an image. The meaning of the image can be obvious at first glance,
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The assignment for Day 3 offers these three parameters: Prompt: trust Form: acrostic Device: internal rhyme Acrostic Acrostics have been around for millennia: they’re a creative way to give order and convey multiple meanings at once while staying fairly subtle. There have been two prevalent ways to create acrostics. In one, you follow the sequence
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Here’s the assignment for Day 2: Prompt: journey Form: limerick Device: alliteration limerick Limericks are traditionally composed of five lines of verse. The traditional rhyming scheme of a limerick is a a b b a — the first two lines rhyme, then the next two, and the final verse rhymes with the first couplet. Write
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Today begins WordPress Writing 201: Poetry Class. How great it is to have such a resource available for FREE! I write strictly nonfiction, so this class is a big stretch for me. But I’m determined to work on my writing this year, and what better way to do that than to dabble in something WAY
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My major life activities are reading (usually fiction) and writing (always nonfiction). So I’m delighted when I come across something that combines the two: something like Marcy McKay’s writing challenge What Your Favorite Books Tell You About Your Writing. Marcy runs The Write Practice, a web site and newsletter aimed at fiction writers, but even
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I admit that when I set this challenge up for myself near the end of December, I did so with trepidation: Would I be able to find something to write about EVERY SINGLE DAY? Would I be able to do all the research necessary for each post during a single day? Would I be able
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We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live is the first and only documentary being made about Joan Didion. While her writing is fierce and exposed, Joan herself is an incredibly private person. We have the privilege to know Joan as a subject and also as a member of our family. Our director, Griffin Dunne,
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Related Posts: Introduction to Life Stories “Before I Go to Sleep,” S.J. Watson: We Are What We Remember Life Stories: The Personal Component 11 Novels That Feature Life Stories Must We Like Fictional Characters? “Mr. Mercedes” by Stephen King: The Power of Characters Although the concept of life story originated in the field of
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Tragic fiction may leave you emotionally upset It might seem logical that reading a sad fictional story would be less upsetting than reading a less sad but true story. But new research suggests this is not the case: “Consumers may choose to read a tragic fictional story because they assume that knowing it was fictional
