For my thirteenth birthday my parents gave me a five year pink leatherette diary with a key. I made entries for four years and then gave up. It wasn’t a happy experience. The diary had pages divided into five spaces for each year and I always felt frustrated because either there wasn’t enough room for what I wanted to write or guilty because I didn’t feel like writing that day. When my mother read it behind my back all hell broke loose and I was grounded for weeks. My little brother stole it once and for a price he offered to read pages aloud to my boyfriends. When I read the diary decades later I’d written it like such a teenage ditz that I ended up throwing it out.
teaching writing
claiming your own life
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 5 Comments
The complicated and sticky part of writing your life into story is that you have to connect to your inner life to do it and it’s so much easier to chug along the surface of things. Just about any activity beats facing your own imperfect self on the page. You suddenly develop a compulsion to work out at the gym, clean the garage, put your CDs in alphabetical order, locate all your old classmates from junior high on the internet, or my personal favorite: cook enough hearty soup to get whole armies through arctic winters. Once when I was really stuck in my writing, I dug up half the backyard to create the world’s largest compost pile. Any compulsive activity seems so much easier and more useful than writing.
Personal Essays
3 steps and 6 questions
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 1 Comment
Steps for writing and publishing the personal essay:
Brainstorm. Use the issues you generated in the last exercise. Let this be the sloppy part. You’re creating and there’s no way to be neat and right about it. Brooke recently took a wonderful photograph of her nephew Axel painting a blue picture. There’s blue everywhere: on his arms, in his hair. That’s what you’re doing here; getting blue paint all over yourself and writing so fast that your critic can’t offer an opinion. You’re discovering your own material.
Terrific Books, Writing Your Own History
fiction: an imaginary tea party
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 4 Comments
When you want to fictionalize your life in a short story or a novel, your props might be a theme that you want to explore, a true life setting, some characters who may be real people in your life (more about them later), and emotion. The emotion is important. And it’s not really a prop of course – it’s the engine of your fiction. Hopefully you also have fragments of a story. Something happens in fiction. Your characters want/need something, they struggle for it, things go wrong, and in the end they either get it (happiness, peace, the girl/boy, money, property, understanding etc.), or they don’t. But there’s action in the struggle. They don’t just sit around thinking about it like we usually do in real life.
Writing Your Own History
writing your own history
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 4 Comments
There are two ways to write your own history. Write a memoir – just one period of your life. Or write an autobiography – your whole life from birth up to this moment. Both are non-fiction and true. (There’s a wonderful discussion of truth in memoir, thanks to James Frey and Oprah, all over the newspapers as I write this.)
teaching writing
what works works (sort of)
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
I’m always stressing Proper Manuscript Form for final drafts. You’ve got to have paragraphs! I tell my students. Real ones, not the double jump in space that your computer automatically does. You have to set up the paragraph format: indent the opening line, double space in manuscripts or 1.5. And use quotation marks because it’s confusing without them, and don’t do anything odd or weird in the text layout, keep the form simple so your words are all that’s noticed.
Personal Essays, Writing Your Own History
the personal essay: weird shoes, etc.
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
If you can write a coherent sentence and are willing to work hard, you can write a personal essay, each and every one of you. And most likely get it published too. Yes, a number of you may be rolling your eyes right now, but it’s true. You’ve got a shot at this. And the personal essay is the one genre of writing I can say this about.
Fooling Around with Poems
poetry: cutting to the chase
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 2 Comments
Poetry is included here because I think all writers should read poems, and because attempting to write poems can help you write better prose. A screenwriter once told me he wrote and studied poetry to help tighten and concentrate his dialog.
Writing Your Own History
the best assignment you’ll ever get
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
Go to a library or a bookstore and browse. Dip into books. Find the latest books by your favorite authors. Find the kind of book, or collection of essays, that you want to write. Find your muse and mentor, your literary love. Check out or buy as many books as possible. Go home and read. When you’re writing you can rationalize these book binges. You’re acquiring essential tools for your job.
Writing Your Own History
the 5 minute exercise
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 3 Comments
This morning in my writing workshop at the Wellness Community we began, as we always do, writing a list of pains and pleasures: the most hurtful things that had happened in the past month and then the things that had brought pleasure and happiness. Everyone wrote for five minutes. The five minute time limit for writing is crucial and the whole workshop is set up around it – three hours of five minute writing exercises about different topics and then reading the exercises aloud…..
teaching writing
making a muse
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
Since it’s highly unlikely that a kindly muse will announce from above that you should start writing immediately, and equally improbable that the people you love are encouraging you to write about all the deep personal aspects of your life, and since you might just possibly have this little voice in your head humming about…
teaching writing
everything you need to know about writing on 1 page
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 2 Comments
1. Here’s how you learn to write: Read. You need to be inspired and you need the best teachers in the world. You find this by reading. Write. Writing is like running a marathon or playing the clarinet or laying bricks or becoming a basketball player. You need to practice. 2. There’s nothing until there’s…
