Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you. You can write about:
- What amazes/surprises/angers you
- What you wonder about
- What you notice
- "Seed Ideas" or "Triggers" to generate stories or poems
- Small details that intrigue you
- Snatches of talk you overhear
- Memories
- Lists
- Photos, articles, ticket stubs or other artifacts
- Your own sketches, drawings or doodles
- Quotes or inspiring passages from books or poems
Once you have gathered a lot of writing in your notebook, try the following ideas:
- Reread to dig out the best material
- Experiment with new kinds of writing
- Try to write something beautiful but don't expect all your writing to be great. Give yourself permission to write badly!
- Write about personal things--fears, nightmares, or dreams--that contain strong feelings
- Write about writing
Remember these tips:
- Keep your notebook with you so you can write at any place and time.
- Pull your notebook out whenever you have a few minutes with nothing else to do.
- The notebook you keep should reflect you. If you like to draw, draw in your notebook.
- Writing can be fun. Your notebook is a place to enjoy writing.
Prewriting Strategies For Your Writing:
- Write in Your Writer's Notebook. A writer's notebook gives you an easy, informal, no-pressure way to start thinking about a topic. Great for brand-new "seed ideas".
- Talk It Out. Sometimes I'll get together with a friend to kick around an idea I'm thinking about. There's a little danger here--if you talk too much you can talk the mystery out of an idea. I have found that a little talk goes a long way.
- List Ideas. Lists are a great way to gather material. The idea is to generate ideas. Don't worry if some ideas are better than others. And don't worry too much about getting the ideas in the right order.
- Make A Web. You may have done this before. Put the main idea in the center, and make a "spoke" for each connected idea.
- Make A Simple Timeline. I find this idea very helpful for writing stories. Jot down when each important event happened. Now, where do you want to start the writing? At the beginning of the timeline? In the middle? At the end?
- Three by Three by Three. Give yourself three minutes to write three ideas on three different topics. Great for generating ideas.
- Free Write. Give yourself a short amount of time (five to seven minutes) to jot down ideas, words, fragments related to a topic. If you doing this right your pen should never leave the page. One friend of mine calls it "Hot-Penning". Don't think: write! Let your pen go wild. Later you can go back and circle any parts you want to use.
All these ideas come to you from Ralph Fletcher's site, which is full of great ideas for aspiring writers.
About Me
Find our handout HERE!
Where Does Writing Hide?
During our first week together, we'll be trying to generate a variety of ideas for potential pieces in our Writer's Notebook. We'll play with a number of writing prompts and styles in order to give us some ideas for writing more polished pieces later on in our quarter together.
Writer Georgia Heard offers some wonderful advice in her book on writing titled Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Finding Your Way on where to begin your search for ideas. We will begin our search for ideas by reading selection from Ms. Heard's book. Each selection ends with a writing prompt, which we will complete in our Writer's Notebooks.
Where Does Writing Hide? pages 10-12
Many of us grew up thinking that ideas for writing come from the fascinating and adventurous lives of writers. What I love about this poem is that it dispels that myth and reminds us that poems, and all writing, are hiding in the most ordinary and familiar places - if we can only change our way of looking at them.
At a recent workshop I asked people to list where poems hide in their lives. Here are some of the places they named: in my father's chair, in spider webs attached to the walls of the garage, in the taste of spinach in my mouth, in my mother's silence. Their catalogue itself sounded like a poem, it was so vivid and surprising.
We don't necessarily have to change our lives around to be writers or to be writing more. We must change the way we look at our lives. By looking at the small, everyday circumstances and happenings, we find ideas to fill volumes.
Make a list of places where writing hides for you. Be specific. Instead of "Nature," say "In the oak leaves frozen in the pond." Instead of "Memories," write "In the papery skin of my grandmother's hands." Check around your life, and you'll find an abundance of writing ideas.
Writers Gather
Writers collect ideas, gather them up in notebooks, on scrap pieces of paper, on napkins. So as we explore where writing ideas come from, we too must be gatherers. We must gather ideas, gather inspiration, and gather words.
Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge has a great idea for finding inspiration in her book
Poemcrazy. She suggests that writers collect words and create what she calls "wordpools". So let's give it a try! Here's her explanation for what a "wordpool" is:
"I borrow words from poems, books and conversations. Politely. Take polite. If I’m in a classroom, I just start chalking them onto the board. I don’t worry about spelling or meaning. Curdle. Cantankerous. Linoleum. Limousine. Listen. Malevolent. Sukulilli, the Maidu Indian word for silly. Magnet cat oven taste tilt titter.
I call gathering words this way creating a wordpool. This process helps free us to follow the words and write poems." (10)
Let's take some time to read
her chapter on wordpools. After you finish reading, we'll be using the magazines and newspapers on our desks to create our own wordpools. Then we'll use our gathered words to play around with creating a piece for tomorrow.
PRACTICE, from page 12-13
Write words down. Flap tip lob. Elope. Scrounge.
Look around and steal some words. Lamborghini. Jute. Wombat.
Go ahead and make up a word. Losoonie. Flapoon. Noplat.
Be sloppy. Don’t think. You can’t make a mistake, there aren’t any wrong words. Phantom strut tumble porch. Dragoon.
Don’t worry too much about meaning for now. Words carry meaning along with them. Put words down and meaning will begin to rush in.
Give each word a color. Vermilion regret.
List the senses and give each sense a color. Peach hearing.
Toss in words from foreign languages. Ciao.
Go for sound: hum, fizz, fiddle, fandango, zigzag, ziggurat, folderol, armadillo. Tintinabulation.
Collect field guides. I often bring an insect, rock or butterfly book to workshops and we list words like window winged moth, globular springtail or porphyry, a purple rock named for the Latin and Greek word for “purple.”
My friend Tom’s Ford pickup repair manual is chock full of great words: luminosity probe, diesel throttle control tool, acceleration pump link, swivel,
internal vent valve, choke hinge pin. . . .
Look for a Magnetic Poetry Kit of words that stick to the refrigerator. My friend Arielle got a kit and told me, “Things just come out of you.” She wrote
about her family’s twenty-one-year-old cat, Jumbo,
white puppy petal
you gorgeous milk fluff
sleep all day lick
tiny love from time
and dream
Writers Take Risks
Good writing, writing that really speaks to us usually connects with us because the writer has made him or herself vulnerable. Good writing is not generic or vague. It is specific, it is detailed, and often the writer has taken a personal risk to share something personal with us the reader. So here's what I'm going to ask you: take a risk. Good writing comes from a vulnerable place. Now I'm not asking you to write about your most painful memories or experiences. Instead, what I'm asking you to do is to be willing to step outside your comfort zone. If you usually poems, take a risk and try rewriting one of your poems as an essay. If you generally write fantasy stories about a distant future, step outside your comfort zone to write a poem. By taking that risk, by being a bit vulnerable, you may just be surprised about the writing that you can do!
Here's what Susan Goldsmith Woolridge in her book Poemcrazy has to say about taking risks:
Chapter 20: Snowflakes and Secrets
More Resources for Finding Inspiration
Having trouble coming up with ideas for your writing? Check out these resources:
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.