My winter Seattle Writing Class, Follow the Story, will explore a number of writing genres, including memoir writing. Memoir is especially useful in treating questions of identity, a particularly American dilemma, as this is a country without strong classes and …
Tag: First Person Writing
Restaurant exemplifies ideal of Travel Writing Classes
nick
Posted in Classes, Food and Wine Writing Classes, Travel, Wine Making and Wine Writing
—
No Comments ↓
In my Travel Writing Classes, I love to visit restaurants with a strong sense of place. Though European restaurants often exhibit this connection with place, North American restaurants are making this a priority, too. Thus, it was a great pleasure …
Restaurant exemplifies ideal of Travel Writing Classes Read More »
Nut Graph and Angle: Keys to Strong Openings
NUT GRAPH AND ANGLE The nut graph is the context paragraph, the place where you orient the reader, making clear the circumstances of the story and what it means. Nut graphs are used with all leads. It’s crucial to include …
Summary Leads: The Quickest and Easiest Way to Open a Story
SUMMARY LEADS These leads allow you to get to the point of your story quickly and easily. The trick is to make them appealing as well. Writers using summary leads often employ wordplay or humor to liven them up. “It …
Summary Leads: The Quickest and Easiest Way to Open a Story Read More »
Phillip Lopate Speaks About First Person Writing
Anyone who has laughed out loud while reading Against Joie de Vivre by Phillip Lopate would have enjoyed his talk on Feb. 27 at the AWP Conference in Seattle. He credited Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground as an important early …
Phillip Lopate Speaks About First Person Writing Read More »
-
And as imagination bodies forth
William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a nam -
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
Ernest Hemingway -
“One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.”
Patricia Marx -
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver -
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O’Connor
© 2021 The Writer's Workshop
| Privacy
The Writer's Workshop, an on-campus and online program offering writing
classes in Seattle, online and travel writing classes.