Where do you do your writing? It’s a question I get asked often. I have a small office at my house that overlooks a deck and some leafy summertime trees. When it’s winter, the window becomes glazed with frost in spectacular patterns. I sit with my back to the view and with a bookshelf to the right of me. It’s filled with books I mean to read and photographs of my family. Opposite I have a painting that is dear to me; the desk if filled with CDs, pens and notes. I think anyone wandering in (not that anyone’s allowed to wander in!) would find it a cosy place to write. But I’m lucky to be able to write off a home office as a business expense. Before I could do that, I always tried to make a little spot that was purely for writing – a small desk in the corner of my bedroom when I was a student or a comfy chair in the living room where I could cuddle up with a laptop (not such a good idea if you value your back.) It’s worth a little thinking time. A place that is dedicated to your writing is essential. It shows you (and those around you) that writing is important.
Posts tagged ‘writing’
August 4, 2010
Janet Fitch
Below is the first of Janet Fitch’s 10 Writing Tips That Can Help Almost Anyone: it’s from her website http://janetfitchwrites.wordpress.com/ and I encourage you to go and look at it. Right now!
1. Write the sentence, not just the story
Long ago I got a rejection from the editor of the Santa Monica Review, Jim Krusoe. It said: “Good enough story, but what’s unique about your sentences?” That was the best advice I ever got. Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences. The music of words. I like Dylan Thomas best for this–the Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. I also like Sexton, Eliot, and Brodsky for the poets and Durrell and Les Plesko for prose. A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone’s writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.
