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Tag: exercise

Macabre Dance with Your Unconscious

Have you ever done something, or thought something, you’re ashamed of?

Uncomfortable as it is, dredge up that memory. We’ll be using it for today’s exercise.

The purpose of our experiment is to demonstrate the effect on our conscious when we try to write something our unconscious doesn’t want written.

Find a place you feel safe. Sit by the fire, if you can, or if that’s not possible, have a shredder under your desk. You’ll want access to methods of rapid complete destruction.

Are you sitting uncomfortably? Good. Let’s begin.

this is where the wicked writing goes

Continue reading “Macabre Dance with Your Unconscious”


Writers and Their Emotions

I’m going for a 60s health-ed movie feel in the title, in case you missed it.

sunriseWriting without emotion is pointless. If you don’t move your readers to feel something, you accomplish nothing. Even with non-fiction, teaching a topic requires moving your readers to care enough to latch on.

With fiction, emotion is everything.

It’s no wonder, then, that we fiction writers are a moody lot.

I have days of euphoria. I also have days in the doldrums. (Like when we have the rare phenomenon of 10 gloomy days straight here in the frozen north.)

A dear friend commented this morning that they were feeling down about their writing.

Steven Pressfield posted about the pure unadulterated panic induced by the research for his latest book.

It’s gonna happen. Continue reading “Writers and Their Emotions”


Seriously Overreacting to an Annoying Early Morning Noise

I’m writing some experimental fiction as part of my daily writing exercises. You’re seeing it because, though it’s not haute cuisine, it’s not egg shells and coffee grounds either. These will show up here and there, now and then.

The constant thrum vibrates my chest. Somewhere, a big engine turns, a little too fast. The pistons push the crankshaft past its limit, setting up harmonic distortions.

Over the thrum is a rhythmic oom oom oom, another layer of vibration.

The snow begins to lose coherence as its resonant frequency is touched twice in each cycle. Patches collapse flat to the ground, leaving three foot deep sinkholes in the white crystal powder.
Continue reading “Seriously Overreacting to an Annoying Early Morning Noise”