Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.
Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro
A writing podcast for writers and curious readers, featuring interviews with authors, poets, agents and editors. Twice chosen as one of Writer’s Digest Magazine’s 101 Best Website for Writers. Vermont-grown.
Episodes
Tuesday Sep 24, 2019
Tuesday Sep 24, 2019
Vermont Author Archer Mayor just published his 30th Joe Gunther novel, Bomber's Moon (Minotaur).
Blood Moon, Super Moon, Blue Moon, Harvest Moon, Bomber’s Moon. This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to come up with a new type of moon, and write about a night on which it rises.
Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.
Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Sandra A. Miller, author of Trove: A Woman's Search for Truth and Buried Treasure (Brown Paper Press).
This week’s Write the Book Prompt was suggested by my guest, Sandra A. Miller. Read the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “What If You Slept?” And then use the lines as your prompt for this week:
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?
In other words: what if we pulled our dreams into the world and made them a reality? What would you want to bring into the world--your physical reality--from your dreams? When Sandra shared this with a group of writers recently, the results were rich, and the experience of the participants, emotional.
Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.
Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro
*“What if you slept...” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Public Domain.
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
Interview from 2013 with Australian Author Poppy Gee. We discussed her novel, Bay of Fires (Reagan Arthur; Back Bay Books subsequently published the paperback.)
This week's Write the Book Prompt is to consider Poppy Gee’s character, Sarah, whose reckless behavior has cost her so much. Write about someone’s reckless behavior. Depending on who your character is, reckless might look very mild or outrageous. How does it affect the person’s experience and life? What might come next as a result?
Good luck with your work in the coming week and please listen next week for another prompt or suggestion.
Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro
Monday Sep 02, 2019
Monday Sep 02, 2019
Vermont Author Miciah Bay Gault, whose debut novel is Goodnight Stranger (Park Row Books).
This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to try your hand at the exercise that brought Miciah to find the first line of Goodnight Stranger, a trick that was suggested to her by former WTB guest Juliana Baggott: Try summing up your novel in the first sentence, and see what happens.
When she was the editor of the journal Hunger Mountain, Miciah set the authors of one issue this task, which comes from a famous Ray Bradbury exercise for generating ideas: "jot lists, without thinking too hard, of the things that represent the writer’s deepest interests, preoccupations, desires, fears, obsessions." This original exercise can be found in Bradbury's essay "Run Fast, Stand Still, Or, The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts from Old Minds" in his book Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity. So that can be a second Prompt this week.
Monday Sep 02, 2019
Monday Sep 02, 2019
Archive Interview with Moira Crone. We discussed her 2012 novel, The Not Yet (Univ of New Orleans Press).
This week’s Write the Book Prompt is to begin with one of the following phrases, and write from where it leaves off:
- After he dove into the water…
- Through the haze and beyond the line of tractors, he saw…
- When she found the watch in her sister’s top dresser drawer…
Good luck with your work in the coming week, and tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.
Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro