Category Archives: Megan Lobsinger
Wednesday Writing Exercise: A Part of Your Mind Escapes
Maybe there’s a place of balance to be found between who we resolve to be and what we let ourselves see and hear and perceive. Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: The Return of the Light
This holiday season is the eleventh hour of staring at the blank screen, when all that time you spent waiting yields the fruit of your patient faith. Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Critical Hit
For this week’s Wednesday Writing Exercise I’m asking you to try my favorite collaborative writing exercise, which lives somewhere between Telephone and Pictionary. Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Back to the Word
Do you tend to hop straight from the first flicker of inspiration to the three-volume novel with your writing? Try this fun exercise to help you scale things back. Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Ransom Note
Write your own ransom note borrowing the voice of a known or invented character, a dead president, a Hollywood star, a fairy tale creature, a friend—anyone! Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Parroting Toward Voice
I think we find our voice by copying the voices of others. In the same manner that we take on the speech patterns of our best friends, that we try to listen to the same music as our older siblings, that we wear the clothes of the people we think are cool Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Write What You Don’t Know?
It’s good to write what you know, yes, but it’s also good to write toward what you most want to know, from a mind and a voice of delight and discovery. Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Telling It Slant
One of our jobs as writers—maybe even as people—is to recognize the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s like Emily Dickinson says, “The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind—” Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Jumping the Shark
Here’s the thing about jumping the shark—it’s pretty fun. Not only that, maybe if we engage in the desire to get ridiculous in our writing, we’ll free ourselves to discovery. Continue reading
The Art of Being Concise: A Conversation with Brevity’s Dinty W. Moore
“I tell my student writers to spend 90% of their time perfecting their writing and 10% understanding how publishing works…If you reverse that equation—90% of your time spent fretting about publication contracts—you’ve made a big mistake.” Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Last Line First, First Line Last
“Mystery is not vagueness. Mystery is controlled.” —Amy Hempel In an interview with The Paris Review, the famously deliberate short story writer Amy Hempel describes her writing process, which occurs on the sentence level rather than the plot level. She … Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Object Lessons
Today’s Writing Exercise: Start by locating an object in your home—maybe one that fills you with emotion every time you look at it, or maybe one that you’ve ignored for years. Continue reading
Wednesday Writing Exercise: Dialogue
“We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces!” –Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard Sometimes I wonder if people who have large families have a keener instinct for writing dialogue. Recently, I had the opportunity to introduce my quiet little family—mom, dad, two … Continue reading
