Month: June 2019
#FMF Question
Every Friday I take Kate’s word and write for 5 minutes. Start the timer and see what your subconscious brings forth!
And…GO!
I question everything: people, intentions, motivations, my own thoughts. I love questions, especially to ask them and catch people off guard. I believe the truth is more likely to come out that way.
Prompts are questions for my writer self to get her answers. There is a WHY underneath that is more of a statement than a question.
I like questions that start with
What if…
What happens next?
Common questions are the ones people lie when they answer. “How are you?” we ask…FINE is the answer. Do you know anyone who is really FINE?
You can read the rest of this post here.
10 Summer Solstice Celebrations
June 21 is the Summer Solstice and deserves personal celebration. There is more daylight today than any other day of the year and it must be savored and taken advantage of! Here are 10 ideas for you to make it happy and special.
- Start a new notebook.
- Try a new recipe. [Here is one I love]
- Do yoga Sun Salutations.
- Learn about a new idea [I am researching satori].
Read the rest of this post here.
This is 45! A Birthday Tribute
A piece inspired by the teaching of English Teacher Kelly Gallagher. When I turned 40 I wrote a similar piece but my life has changed dramatically in 5 years. You can read the This is 40. blog post here.
To read the updated version This is 45.You can read the rest of that post here.
Bradbury Triggers
You can read this post on Medium here.
As much reading about writing as I have done, I only recently discovered Ray Bradbury’s NOUN writing exercise. If you love lists and writing it is the perfect writing prompt. Here is the link to the Brain Pickings article outlining his unusual writing practice.
Inspired by Bradbury, I wrote my own list and have been writing 100–200 word pieces using one noun as a trigger. This exercise is unlocking stories hiding in my mind.
My First List of Nouns:
The night. The Dark. The empty. The foot. The drawer. The book. The manuscript. The eve. The house. The fireplace. The castle. The moors. The pool. The date auction. The class. The ring. The roller skates. The pen. The candle. The heart. The mirror. The run.
…
My Variation
I asked some friends over the weekend to text me a short list of nouns to use as springboards for writing. This variation is more in line with the random word prompt. The lists are not my own so the emotional story unlocking potential is not as prominent.
Here are opening lines of a story I wrote using this noun list: The Horse. The Banana. The Table. The Peanut Butter. The Glasses.
It was a rainy, too warm October day when the horse dropped dead in the middle of the pasture. He didn’t know what to do with death. Peanut butter freed a six year old’s horses around the corner. The little one hid in a closet and wasn’t found for 2 days. A peanut butter and banana sandwich can be deadly in more ways than one. One bite taken out of the square white softness was enough to change a whole family, and the town they lived in.
Jack took his glasses off and set them on the table and rubbed the space between his eyes with the two fingers of his right hand. They were stained with dark black ink as they always were. They were calloused and rough. He could hold balls of fire without pain. Maybe they could even resist death. He hadn’t had the opportunity to experiment. Jack joked and told people that he could handle the heat because of all the evil his hands had done.They never knew if he was kidding.
My plan is to try this prompt with students as well to see what unlocks in their minds!
#happy writing
Tammy Breitweiser is a writer and teacher who is a force of nature and woman of honor; seer of nuance; accidental inspirationalist; keeper of the little red doors, and conjurer of everyday magic who is busy writing short stories. A future Minnesotan temporarily hiding in Indiana, her poetry has been published in The Storyteller Magazine and her flash fiction in The Ninja Writers Monthly and Elephant Never. Her essay is published in the I Wrote it Anyway anthology. You can also connect with Tammy through Twitter @TLBREIT.
Birthday Weekend Coffee Share
I am excited you have joined me for coffee today. It is Father’s day in the US and my birthday. I think we will have some birthday cupcakes this morning to celebrate but no singing.
I am having a Butter Brew coffee with a shot of espresso for the occasion. What would you like today?
If we were having coffee, I would tell you this week has been full of ups and downs.
To read the rest of this post please click here. Please comment and clap (I believe you can clap up to 30 times).
How Much Memory Do You Have Remaining?
An alert popped up on my computer screen warning my Google Drive was running out of memory. To combat this problem I deleted and reorganized files into folders for easier access. With the ease of use of Google Drive, I have random documents floating in the abyss of the cloud.
During NANOWRIMO 2 years ago I wrote a complete short story as my project. In my haste, I did not place these stories into a folder but just save them in the general drive with the intention of organizing them later. This is a bad idea.
I am organized to a point, but if I’m frenzied or passionate about an idea I save but do not curate.
To read this post please click here. Please comment and clap (I think you can clap up to 30 times!)
#FMF Friday
Every Friday I write for 5 minutes about the word assigned by Kate. You can check out other pieces here.
Set the timer for 5 minutes and GO!
Goals are a thing I have always set for myself since I was young. Always striving for something is ingrained within me. Goals give me purpose.
You can read the rest of this post by clicking here.
Questions about Hope
The word hope has surfaced within different venues within a short period of time recently. In my experience concepts which show themselves in short duration are ones I need to pay attention to. It means there is a learning opportunity for me.
One workshop I attended this year was facilitated by Jim Knight about leadership and one of the main concepts was …you guessed it…HOPE.
The Number 1 Secret to Being A Better Writer
I am officially on summer break and have been enjoying a much different schedule than during the regular school year. If you want to read more about that I wrote about it here.
Today I went outside on the back porch with my coffee and did a breathing exercise. I breathed in and thought about light and then breathed out slowly thinking about released dark. Very simple, but calming and effective.
As I sat in the sunshine of this beautiful June morning I thought about what it means to be a writer. It comes down to a simple truth:
