Just one more month until my next book birthday @vine_leaves_press! Woot! 🎂🎯 Pre-order your copy of Writing It Real: Crafting a Reference Book that Sells at Amazon.
Upcoming Writing Class: Flash Writing! 📝
Super excited to offer my Flash Writing class this summer! Mark your calendars now, and I’d love to have you and a friend join me for this online workshop, starting Friday, July 1, 2022.
Sign-ups are now open.
More info: Featured Online Flash Writing Workshop: In a Flash!
I’ll be using the book I wrote on this topic, which is also available and handy-dandy for all writers, whether you’re in the market for a class or for a prompt-filled read to get those words flowing.
Writing Prompt with a Quote in It
Ever since I read this quote earlier this week, I’ve been thinking that it would make a perfect prompt for creating a character or journaling. 📝🍵
It's Book Birthday Time! 🎉📚
I couldn’t resist staying up to ring in the book birthday of my next book: Writing It Real: Creating an Online Course for Fun and Profit! Woot! 🎉
Available at Amazon as well as signed copies at my Etsy shop, WritePathProductions.
Many thanks for celebrating with me and for all of your wondrous support!
Pre-Order Time! 📚
Super excited to announce that the pre-order for my next book is all set!
Whether you’ve never taught an online class before or if you’ve been an educator for years, if you’ve ever thought about launching your own online course or brushing up on your teaching skills to bring extra pizzazz to your classroom this book is for you.
I’ve packed it with tips, advice, exercises, humor, and lots of can-do motivation to inspire the class-creation and class-launching experiences from choosing a theme through syllabus creation through marketing and more! Also, it’ll make the perfect gift for the favorite educator friend in your life this holiday season.
To pre-order and learn more: Amazon Paperback and Amazon E-book .
Relaunch: Renewed! 30 Affirmation Cards
After redesigning the box of my Portable Muse Cards this summer, I crafted a new box for a second printing of my Renewed! 30 Affirmation Cards, too. They’re now up for sale at my Etsy and all set for great new homes. Ta-da!
Get your cards and more info at: WritePathProductions (my Etsy store).
📚🖊My Flash Article Published Today🖊📚
It's a great news kind of day! My article, "The Inherent I: 4 Reasons for Using Fabulous First-Person POV in Flash," was published by Women on Writing today. Read the whole article below, as well as a free prompt to try. 😎
Interested in more? I’m taking sign-ups for my April Flash Fiction course: clickety!
“The Inherent I: 4 Reasons for Using Fabulous First-Person POV in Flash”
By: Melanie Faith
Both flash fiction and nonfiction often feature first-person narrators. What are the advantages of using I speakers when writing flashes?
First person is focused. A speaker in first-person narration showcases their own inner landscape, feelings, and outlook. Whether fiction or nonfiction, a first-person speaker follows one person’s tightly-woven motivations, blinders, opinions, hopes, and goals. There’s no head-hopping involved!
Since flash is so small, it’s helpful to have a narrow, beam-of-light approach rather than several POVs competing for the very limited space available under 1,000 words, but often much less.
First person is natural to the ways we think and already form stories. From the time we start to talk, I, me, and my are some of our first words we learn to speak or to write. When we tell friends about the picnic we enjoyed or the meal that went terribly wrong, chances are very strong we frame our anecdotes in first-person. It’s often our default mode when communicating via text, email, or video conferencing as well. Humans inherently express our own experiences using I statements. Why go against the grain in our writing?
First person includes room for surprises. Yes, it’s first-person narration, but in the case of flash fiction especially, that doesn’t have to mean the character presented has to share all of your own experiences, feelings, or beliefs. In fact, it might be more fun to play devil’s advocate and writing a character who is your polar opposite.
Say, you are a marathon runner who’s just had an injury and has been limited to moderate exercise and no training for the next six months during physical therapy. You’re itching to get back on the track, back to your passion for the sport, to your next race. Flip it and reverse that energy as you recuperate. What if your protagonist has never run a marathon in his life? What if he actually detests running? What if someone dares or even bribes him to run a marathon or else there will be consequences? Yep, you can write this in first-person POV to see life from his perspective. Or perhaps from the perspective of his coworker, Meghan, who has issued the challenge/bribe. What’s her perspective like, and why is she making this request/demand?
First person could include any of these details, just not all of them at once. You never know what you’ll learn about yourself—or others—or your favorite sports, hobbies, pastimes, and more through leaping into another person’s eyes.
First person includes promising limits. Yes, first person can be limited, but that’s also part of its charm.
In a nonfiction flash essay, for instance, the reader does not get to delve deeply into the feelings or actions of many others, unless those are in relation to—and shed important light on—the first-person speaker’s journey. It’s all about the speaker, baby!
The reader gets to intuit and experience the speaker’s limits and foibles as well as their strengths and fears.
What a writer reveals in first person as well as what must be left out because it is told in first person provide a compelling insight into human behavior, both for the individual and for people in that setting or time period or group the speaker belongs to, or wishes to, or never will.
Try this prompt! Set a timer for fifteen or twenty minutes. Write in first person about a time when the I speaker—whether you or a made-up character—felt left out of a group. Do not use the word disappointed anywhere in the flash; instead, demonstrate it with the I statements the person uses, their astute observations about why they wanted this inclusion but it hasn’t come to be, and/or in their actions or refusal to act. Go!
Photo courtesy of Nathan DeFiesta on Unsplash.com
"Sharpen Your Sensory Writing with Food Writing" Article Published :)
Great news! My article was published today at Women on Writing. Read on, and savor the prompt at the end.
“Sharpen Your Sensory Writing with Food Writing”
By: Melanie Faith
Photo by Brooke Lark at unsplash.com
Food, glorious food! I’ll tell you a secret: I’m certainly not the world’s best or most adventurous cook, but I adore food in all of its gooeyness, crispiness, savoriness, sweetness, smoothness, chewiness, cheesiness, and freshness. I even sometimes love its greasiness (here’s looking at you, beloved French fries with a dollop of salty-sweet Heinz ketchup).
Food is variety and memory and creativity. Food is innovation and tradition and resilience. Food has meant even more recently as it’s meant comfort.
Since quarantine and COVID-19, I’ve found myself, like many writers and creative folks, considering the great value of any certainties and peace-givers amidst the many uncertainties. Food has brought structure to days that, otherwise, would have felt adrift.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks happen every day, however much our schools have closed and gone online, our jobs have gone away or gone online, and our everyday activities, like meeting friends at our homes or at the movies, have been reduced to streaming alone on a phone.
Food remains a constant that has cheered my days, and I’m not the only one—many of my writing friends have noted the uplift food has brought them. We’re trying new recipes or breaking out older ones. Families now spend more time at home without getting take-out and as a result are cooking together, making amazing desserts, main courses, and side dishes that have filled my Instagram with awe.
Friends and family from afar have had motivating, friendly “competitions” to see whose chili recipe or chocolate cake turned out the best; some of us have even Zoomed or Skyped our creations, like a long-distance picnic, while talking or watching TV together. It’s a new world, and yet food shows us that it is also still a connected, social one.
I don’t even have to make or eat the meal myself to enjoy it. Lately, I’ve been watching lots of Netflix cooking shows and the Food Network: from The Great British Baking Show, Crazy Delicious, and Nailed It! to Beat Bobby Flay; Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives; Chopped; Amy Schumer Learns to Cook; and The Pioneer Woman. Some of these shows are competitions while others take viewers into restaurant or home kitchens (or sound stages) where the host offers pleasant explication and a feast for the eyes every time.
As writers, we don’t have to own restaurants or host shows to be experts on the topic. We all eat numerous times a day. We have all eaten hideous dishes that we’re not anxious to repeat as well as delicious food we wish we could eat every day. We all have had the dish that turned out great and the recipe that, despite our best efforts, bombed. We all have memories of food connected—for good or bad—to friends, family, and places (school and hospital cafeterias certainly have their own distinctive tray-bound dishes).
Authentic human emotions are often tied to eating. Many of us have experienced food anxiety, food disorders, food pressures, or struggles with our weight—this is meaningful terrain that can be incorporated into food-writing pieces.
As creatives, writing about food awakens our senses. Food descriptions, symbolism, and images are often profound and resonate with readers. Food has the obvious plate appeal, but it also has scents, textures, and sounds: that sizzling of steak or fajitas, for instance.
One of many things I savor about teaching my Food Writing course is the vast variety of writing food inspires. Writing about food is a wonderful way to deepen our descriptive skills in many genres (fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction essays, to name just three), because writing about food includes incorporating many senses and sensations. It’s also often very, very fun to write.
Food writing is a scene from a novel where characters partake in a protagonist’s going-away potluck dinner. Food writing is a poem about plums in the rain. Food writing is the creation of a new recipe or an essay exploring the cultural and familial history of a beloved tried-and-true recipe.
Food writing is also a short story where a character must learn how to cook within two weeks to impress his in-laws. Food writing is a review of the paneer and the chicken tikka masala at your local Indian restaurant. It’s also a blog about missing your mother and never quite being able to replicate her recipe for macaroni and cheese no matter how hard you try.
Food writing is all of these genres and more; its variations are endless as well as its enjoyment. Food writing is available to refresh the writing of every writer in bite-sized portions or by the baker’s dozen.
Care to learn more? Join my Food Writing class. No previous cooking experience necessary. :) More details here: Food Writing for Fun and Profit.
Try this exercise: Write a list of three or four of your favorite foods. Now, write a list of three or four foods you find obnoxious. Pick one food from your favorite list and one from your least-favorite list and compare them in a scene, a story, a poem, an essay, or any other genre of your choosing. Go!
Photo by Cayla1 at unsplash.com
My Article Published: "4 Photo Hacks to Inspire Your Writing"
Great news! My article was published today. If you like writing & photography, then this one’s for you. Enjoy the writing exercise at the end.
“4 Photo Hacks to Inspire Your Writing”
By: Melanie Faith
Last week, I shot my first roll of film in over a decade.
Up to this point my photos, like a lot of my writing drafts, were entirely digital and screen-manipulated. This analog film process was nothing like that computerized process, refreshingly; it shook up the way I thought about crafting my work.
That first roll of film last week was also a lot of other firsts: first roll of black-and- white film, first time loading 120 film (I used to shoot 110 and 35 mm), first time shooting medium-format square negatives, first time using a cute, plastic Diana F+ camera.
120 film has just 12 negatives per roll. Unheard of in the digital world of endless do-overs and deletes. I still love digital, but practicing image-making on film is teaching me to approach my making creatively.
What can photography lend to our writing process?
• Renew your beginner’s mind.
I’ve been photographing since I was a teen, and yet here I was, trying several new photographic styles that were entirely fresh to me.
Many of us have been writing creatively for years, yet we, too, can capture that beginner’s mind and use it to create innovative drafts.
If you normally write prose, give poetry a shot. If you often write novels, try a short story or two.
Or pick a genre you’ve never practiced: perhaps flash memoir or writing a graphic novel or jokes for a stand-up routine.
Or switching POV from your standby third-person to first-person or second-person.
Or it could be as simple as writing a first draft longhand.
These changes won’t necessarily be permanent; they will, however, bring out new ideas and imagery that will surprise and motivate.
• Add a few restrictions to your art and watch it flourish.
In both photography and writing, sometimes if you put obstacles or limitations in your path, you can create something remarkable.
I know: paradoxical.
When shooting with film, I had just 12 clicks of the shutter. I also couldn’t preview it after taking the shots; the Diana F+ camera has a tiny viewfinder, but it’s not entirely accurate to what the lens will capture—it’s more like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey than aiming at a dartboard. It’s a machine made for teaching how to approach and then let go of expectations.
I had my film for four days before I took that first roll for a spin; four days of narrowing down possible subject matter “worthy” of my twelve little compositions. Seven turned out well enough to submit to a literary magazine. I certainly don’t approach my digital photography that way.
• Approach your writing with more of your full attention.
Because the camera and the shutter-release (on the side of the plastic lens!) and pretty much everything else about the camera was new to me, I had to slow down… and then slow down again… and then a third time. I watched a YouTube tutorial on loading the film about 12 times; no joke.
I quickly learned to trust my instincts more and to rule out certain subject matter in favor of other options, because I knew that I was paying $7.50 for the roll of film and almost $20 for developing.
Even though the cost isn’t exorbitant to practice film photography (especially getting third-hand cameras at an auction site like I did), that it COST me something made each shot precious.
What does your writing cost you? Sleeping in? Time out with family or friends? We value our art more when we sacrifice something for it.
• Think thematically.
Just like writers begin a novel, short story collection, poetry manuscript, or series of essays that surround the same theme or characters, photographers often challenge themselves to create a series based on the same subject, setting, or motif.
The other day, I took a twenty-minute walk with my new camera and then found, in storage, two lawn chairs that had almost been thrown out several times—their worn green webbing and silver metal bases redolent of my parents’ youth and endless picnics and fireworks displays. Yet they’d been stored away.
Gleefully, I dug them out from behind the staircase and arranged them in various configurations on the lawn. Six of out my twelve shots became a mini-series about the chairs.
If I’d had limitless shots would I have found the chairs as compelling, especially for a series? Maybe. But probably not.
It’s very common for writers, like photographers, to take part in creativity challenges that encourage such project-based thinking. Practicing your art with a group of like-minded people for consecutive days will more likely yield workable results.
We writers have NaNoWriMo in November and NaPoWriMo each April. Photographers have challenges like the 365 Project and monthly challenges, such as at Instagram where photographers post themed lists of ideas.
These challenges are often informal but incredibly liberating.
Both writing and photography rely on intuition and self-exploration. A mixture of knowing some things and making up the rest. Both arts often include elements of self-doubt or curiosity that are assuaged with practicing your craft on a regular basis.
Try this exercise: Make a list of five themes you could explore as a series in prose or photography.
Want to learn more? Try my May 2020 online Imagery Power: Photography for Writers class.
Take a perusal of Photography for Writers, my exercise-packed, creativity-fueling book. Signed copies also available at my Etsy: WritePathProductions.
Courtesy of Women on Writing https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_Photography.php
National Poetry Month <3
Break out your pens! Happy National Poetry Month!
Here are a few ideas for sharing, writing, reading, and enjoying poetry while quarantining.
Let’s make bunches of verse this month!
Image courtesy of Nicole Honeywill at unsplash.com