The assignment for Day 5 includes the following: Prompt: fog Form: elegy Device: metaphor Elegy Originally requiring specific meters, nowadays elegies come in all shapes and sizes, though they are united by their (often melancholic) focus on loss and longing. As much as it can mourn something that’s gone forever, it can also celebrate it. […]
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The Day 4 assignment offers these challenges: Prompt: animal Form: concrete poetry Device: enjambment Concrete Poetry Also known as shape poetry, the idea here is to arrange your words on the screen (or the page) so that they create a shape or an image. The meaning of the image can be obvious at first glance,
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The assignment for Day 3 offers these three parameters: Prompt: trust Form: acrostic Device: internal rhyme Acrostic Acrostics have been around for millennia: they’re a creative way to give order and convey multiple meanings at once while staying fairly subtle. There have been two prevalent ways to create acrostics. In one, you follow the sequence
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Here’s the assignment for Day 2: Prompt: journey Form: limerick Device: alliteration limerick Limericks are traditionally composed of five lines of verse. The traditional rhyming scheme of a limerick is a a b b a — the first two lines rhyme, then the next two, and the final verse rhymes with the first couplet. Write
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Today begins WordPress Writing 201: Poetry Class. How great it is to have such a resource available for FREE! I write strictly nonfiction, so this class is a big stretch for me. But I’m determined to work on my writing this year, and what better way to do that than to dabble in something WAY
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My major life activities are reading (usually fiction) and writing (always nonfiction). So I’m delighted when I come across something that combines the two: something like Marcy McKay’s writing challenge What Your Favorite Books Tell You About Your Writing. Marcy runs The Write Practice, a web site and newsletter aimed at fiction writers, but even
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I admit that when I set this challenge up for myself near the end of December, I did so with trepidation: Would I be able to find something to write about EVERY SINGLE DAY? Would I be able to do all the research necessary for each post during a single day? Would I be able
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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience HarperCollins, 1990 ISBN 0–06–092043–2 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life Basic Books, 1997 ISBN 0–465–02411–4 Athletes talk about being “in the zone.” For musicians, it’s being “in the groove.” Even if you’re not an athlete or a musician, you’ve probably shared the
I read 43 books this year, for a grand total of 12,695 pages. The longest was Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which weighs in at 771 pages. Here, listed alphabetically by author, are the 10 best: Atkinson, Kate. Life After Life Fergus, Jim. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd French, Tana. Faithful Place
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I woke up a couple of days ago with this thought: I should challenge myself to write a blog post every day during 2015. I dismissed this thought right away because such a huge commitment seems like setting myself up for failure. Why not just commit to writing a post a day for the month
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