Filling the Well
Hi, friends.
Hope you are well. By the time this hits your inboxes, I’ll be on vacation, stepping out of my comfort zone, seeing and doing new things. Sometime between last email and this one, we’ve reached 100 sign ups! I’m so glad you’re here. I hope you are getting something from this little venture. I get so much from writing it.
I’ve been thinking about creativity this week and how it asks us to say Yes to an assortment of things. Everything we do goes into the well. We may pull from this well years from now. Julia Cameron talks about making weekly artist dates with yourself. Dates where you put yourself into an environment where your curiosity can grow, where you don’t have any expectations except letting your curiosity out to play. A solo hike in the mountains. A visit to the museum. A soap making class. An hour coloring in a coloring book. Dying fabric. Whatever tickles your fancy. So, this is your reminder to make some time to fill the well of inspiration.
Story.
Instead of a story this week, I’m letting you all Choose Your Own Adventure (remember those books? I loved them. I think because it flipped the switch and let the reader be the writer) in the archives to catch up on a story you missed or revisit one of the prompts that speaks to you now in a way it might not have when it first landed in your inbox.
The Swimmer. The very first story I looked at when there were just a handful of you. I love the way this story plays with time and point of view. It’s very deliberate in its details. A classic for a reason.
Windeye. This one is great if you are interested in creating an unsettling atmosphere or unreliable narrator.
Milk Blood Heat. A segmented story, that also has really great dialogue.
~Hope.dox. A braided essay by Sabrina Orah Mark.
There’s also How to Talk to Your Mother: Notes, a segmented story told in reverse chronology. And an assortment of flash fictions.
Other tidbits.
I didn’t realize until last year sometime that Goodreads was owned by Amazon. If you, like me, want to keep track of the books you read and want recommendations and don’t really want to add to the Bezos datamining empire, Storygraph is a great alternative.
Super late notice, but Marie-Helene Bertino is giving a lecture on disrupting realism today at 4 p.m. Est. It looks amazing.
The Wigleaf Top 50 short fictions just came out. Lots of great, little reads here.
That’s all I have this week scribblers. I’ll have a new story and new prompts and new tidbits in two weeks. Until then, take yourself on a date and play a little bit. I bet it helps with with the writing ~
Marsha