August 22, 2010

Laurie Halse Anderson

The rather marvellous Laurie Halse Anderson has a terrific blog post up today.  Here’s a peek at her writing prompt – go to her blog to read the rest of her wise words:

Today’s prompt: Create the flap copy for your book. Doesn’t matter if you are writing fiction, non-fiction, or memoir. Write the two or three sentences that convey the essence of your story in a way that will convince someone to read the entire book.

This can be incredibly hard. In fact, I can’t do it in the earliest draft of my book. This is usually because I haven’t yet fully figured the internal journey of my main character. Take a half dozen of your favorite books off the shelf and read the flap copy to learn how the book was distilled into a few lines. Does that flap copy do a good job of it? Would you have written it differently?

(If you are totally stuck and can’t figure out how to write the flap copy for your story, rewrite the copy for a book that you love.)

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August 21, 2010

Workshop

I have a wonderful after lunch workshop with a group at the Univesity of Saskatchewan Bookstore’s grand re-opening.  We did some freewriting and then we wrote a short piece with the following heading:

The Time I Said Goodbye.

The work read outloud was very strong and moving.  Try the heading for yourself and see what you end up with on the page.

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August 18, 2010

Three word prompt for a poem

Write a poem which has the following three words in it:

GLASS

UNDO

PAINT

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