Write about California, your personal experiences with the Golden State or your perceptions of it.
Write for fifteen minutes. When your time is up, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post, be sure to give feedback on a few practices by other writers.
Write for ten minutes. There must be a sandwich included in your story.
Writers are in constant struggle to come up with the new and unique. Keeping our long history and language boundaries in mind, this is no easy task and only adds more to the daily doses of writers’ anxiety. It’s especially true in moments when you’ve just had “the idea” – the one you were convinced was radically new – and after a quick research you realized it’s as old as your town square.
Thankfully, there are many ways to be ‘new’. Form, style, topic, voice – all these matter; however, sometimes only one of them will do.
It seems that Noir fiction has penetrated literature, even though nobody is really sure what it represents. It’s become a buzzword, used for a stylish touch. Coined in France, the term Roman Noir (Black Novel), signified the Gothic literature of the 18th century originating mainly from England – ‘Frankestein’ by Mary Shelley and ‘Les Miserables’ by Victor Hugo, for example. The meaning and use of the word in fiction has, obviously, shifted over the years.
Whereas Noir can denote various fictive genres – starting from crime, detective and thriller genres to hard-boiled fiction, Gothic and terror novels – and takes many forms, one feature of Noir stands out: the one of the immobilized man.
Does it matter where a writer lives: a big city or the countryside; a two-story house or a basement; a culturally diverse or monotonous neighborhood? Yes, it does. Why is this? There’s a romanticized notion that in the past, writers were generally poor, struggling to get by in attics.
Environments affect all people; this has been confirmed in sociological studies of human life, and urban studies in particular. What surrounds us affects how we feel, what we do, what we think and how we channel these thoughts and emotions.
I’m going to a wedding tomorrow, the first I’ve been to this spring, and I thought it would be fun to write about weddings.
Write about a wedding, a wedding in your work in progress, a wedding you’ve been to, or your own wedding.
Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re time is up, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post, be sure to give feedback on a few practices by other writers.
Have fun!
