184. “What Ethical Dilemmas Have You Faced?”

In response to The New York Times article “650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing.”   184. “What Ethical Dilemmas Have You Faced?”   …   Money is a big issue, and I’ve been offered bribes before. Once, I was offered by a drummer I managed to split the band’s […]

Continue reading

178. “What Are You Grateful For?”

In response to The New York Times article “650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing.”   178. “What Are You Grateful For?”   Read as, What are you waiting for? I want to feel gratitude. It’s hard sometimes. But let us.   Tony Robbins says, “You can’t feel fear or […]

Continue reading

170. “What Are Your Best Sleepover Memories?”

(Blurry like nostalgia now and then; what was your favorite character?)     In response to The New York Times article “650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing.”   170. “What Are Your Best Sleepover Memories?”   Here’s another quaint one to jump into. This one is dedicated to the […]

Continue reading

Write a monologue that feels rhythmically right

(Art by Cosimo Miorelli, for Bloomsday 2015)   Ok, so, this is the third and final Charles Johnson exercise (I must confess, the last three exercises have all been from page 37 of The Way of the Writer, which I finished yesterday).   (3) Write a monologue of at least […]

Continue reading

Mario Levrero — 8 August 23:42

marioLEVRERO_8august2342_ivanBRAVE   Have you been keeping track of the date and time? This tread to write multiple entries per day will become rare as the diary unfolds. It would seem Levrero awoke to much entusiasm, as he says, and gradually slowed down his production–thankfully, not at the cost of his […]

Continue reading

Asesino (Assassin)

(Art by George Fredric Watts, Hope, 1886)   Click here for PDF of Asesino. Asesino is a story inspired by the dream a friend, Diego Sebastian Figueredo, told at a milonga about a year ago.   It begins with an epigraph borrowed from Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder as Considered […]

Continue reading

Describe a Character With Focus on Vowels and Consonants

(Art by Dana Cooper) Today’s exercise again comes from Charles Johnson‘s book, The Way of the Writer, where he credits much of his early development to his late mentor John Gardner:   Describe a character in a brief passage (one or two pages) using mostly long vowels and soft consonants […]

Continue reading

Mario Levrero — 8 August 16:54

marioLEVRERO_8august1654_ivanBRAVE   As one reads these entries, its easy to forget that they were first written by hand. What we read, then, is highly edited by Levrero as he transcribe his words into Word processor. So, when he introduces a character, and interweaves continuations of other characters, there is a […]

Continue reading

110. “Do Your Parents Try Too Hard to Be Cool?”

In response to The New York Times article “650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing”   110. “Do Your Parents Try Too Hard to Be Cool?”   No. They are cool.   I remember once attending an important, late-night exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in the early […]

Continue reading

Write one sentence describing a single emotion for a whole page

Today’s writing exercise comes from Charles Johnson, a National Book Award winner, and author of the novel Middle Passage, the short story collection The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and the graphic novel Shall I Rise–just to name a few publications from his almost fifty years of writing and scholarship. He was the […]

Continue reading

Avoid Editing while you Write, and Writing while you Edit

There are as many methods of producing great literature as there are pens. Nevertheless, one way of sabotaging our output as writers is to criticize before we’ve concluded our daily production of words. When you are writing, write. When you are editing, edit. Both are as essential to great work […]

Continue reading