PRACTICE
Write a story or scene involving money.
Write for fifteen minutes. When your time is up, post your practice in the comments section, and if you post, please be sure to leave feedback for a few fellow practitioners.
Happy writing!
The stereotype goes that writers are introverts – lonely, secluded souls who spend their days exclusively with their words. As much as this holds true for many, it doesn’t cover the whole bunch. Whereas some need to travel away and shut themselves down in order to focus on the project at hand, others thrive in environments full of people, jotting down their thoughts in cafes and bars.
There is, however, a third category for the luckiest of all – those who strike a balance between these two extremes. They call them ambiverts.
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.