From the category archives:

Challenges

Cakepan Manuscript – Chapter Three: Pay to Play

October 11, 2011

This is a creative writing experiment, shamelessly stolen from the Chopin Manuscript: a serialized story where each author writes a different chapter. The members of this blog are each writing their own chapter, and we’re calling ours the “Cakepan Manuscript”. You can start reading at Chapter One, which began with the premise: “An unemployed teacher, [...]

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Trust30 – Motivation for a month to get yourself writing

May 31, 2011

Who are you, and what do you want to say? Do you even know? Finding your own voice and using it in a crowded room is always difficult, but it’s become even tougher with the immense access to ideas and silliness the internet permits. Strong and creative ideas can easily give way to self-doubt, conformity, [...]

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“Try to See It My Way” (Writers and Negative Capability)

October 13, 2010

Image by Getty Images via @daylife “The wise man questions the wisdom of others because he questions his own, the foolish man, because it is different from his own.” —Leo Stein, American art collector and critic In an 1817 letter to a friend, the poet John Keats describes one of the qualities that makes writers [...]

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“Our doubts are traitors…” Measure for Measure (I.iv.77)

August 11, 2010

Image via Wikipedia In his collection of journals entitled Confessions of a Barbarian, the twenty-five-year-old Edward Abbey ponders the progress he is making on his first novel: “The novel, my terrible novel, will drive me to ruin…A frightful labor! “And the worth of it, the quality—the problem worries me night and day. At times I’m [...]

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The Pitfalls of “Originality”

July 28, 2010

One of the distinguishing features of modern society is our preoccupation with originality. Giving proper credit to the creator of something is the basis of everything from copyright law and patent offices to anti-plagiarism policies in high schools and universities. Much of this stems from an artist’s desire to get noticed in some way (as [...]

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