The Writing Craft
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The Power of Surprise in Personal Creative Nonfiction
People today are over-entertained. They are barraged by a haphazard mix of useful and useless information. They are word-wearied. As writers, if we want to attract and maintain the attention of today’s overstimulated readers, we must show them something new. As a late-career English professor, I sometimes feel that I have seen it all. This Continue reading
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What Dreams Can Do for Creative Nonfiction Writers
When she was dying, my grandmother gave me her dream books. The well-worn three volumes had been stacked on her bedside table for as long as I could remember. They consisted of alphabetical listings of dream subjects (airplanes, bananas, cats, death . . .), and their meanings. To dream that a cat jumps onto your Continue reading
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How to Write about What You Don’t Know in Personal Nonfiction
Writing personal nonfiction—memoir or the personal essay—generally requires us to approach our subjects from a first-person point of view. Since we are telling our own stories, we naturally refer to ourselves as “I” and speak as ourselves. We write as factual human beings about our actual lived experiences. By writing in first-person, though, we limit ourselves Continue reading
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The Two “I”s of Memoir
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. William Wordsworth During the British literary Romantic Period (1780s-1830s), William Wordsworth offered a definition of lyric poetry that places memory at the center of the creative process. He suggests that the stuff of poems arises from a poet’s contemplation Continue reading
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Writing about Place in Personal Nonfiction
All of our experiences are located; they happen in a physical space. All of our most profound thoughts and deepest wishes, all of our doubts and our convictions, our heartbreaks and triumphs have been influenced by the place in which they occurred. Fiction writers know that creating a palpable setting for their stories is essential Continue reading
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What to Do When Your Writing Stalls
It happens to me regularly. Maybe it happens to you, too. I’m writing something, and I think the work is going well. Then, after a while, I’m struck by the feeling that what I’m writing is dull and unoriginal, and that it lacks energy. Or I realize that what I’m writing is not the message Continue reading
Do you write about yourself and your experiences? Do you write about traumatic events in your life? Or, do you struggle to find time and motivation to write?
If so, this blog is for you.
Person on the Page 