Sitting On My Hands
This week I’ve been taking a short break from writing. Instead, I’ve been focusing on reading other people’s beautiful writing. It hasn’t much mattered what genre of writing, or even the subject matter. I’ve voraciously consumed literary essays, personal essays, reported pieces, short fiction, flash fiction and poetry.
When I read writing that inspires me, I find it hard to curb my eagerness to frantically scribble something myself. But this week, I’ve been sitting on my hands and just relishing someone else’s words without immediately trying to emulate them. The result is that, instead of having fifteen new works in progress, all in different voices and styles, I have a richer, fuller approach to my existing works in progress, and a truer sense of my own voice.
Do you have a go-to inspirational read? Is there a genre or a writer who ignites that spark for you? Let us know in the comments.
Finally, it’s nearly microprose time again. Make sure to keep an eye out for tomorrow’s post with all the details.
May Poetry Slam: Poetry Criticism
All right, poets, it’s your turn. April was National Poetry Month, so this month instead of a slam we’re going to talk about how to read and critique all that work you generated for your #poemaday before you unleash it on an unsuspecting Internet. Or, if you’ve been reading everyone’s poetry but not feeling sure how to discuss it, it’s a great time to build some vocabulary around poetry critique! Learn more from Rowan here.
Prompt Up!
Prompt Up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post and announce it in the kickoff. It’s your job to use that prompt in your poem or story and then run with it. The prompt is just a springboard, though: feel free to use it as your first sentence, move it, change it, or float it down to other territories.
Rowan talked about the things she doesn’t talk about in her post, Memoir. This week’s Prompt Up taken from her essay is: “We’re popular enough at parties.”
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.
1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the fiction|poetry badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry;
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid;
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message;
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge; and
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog.
Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.
Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…
Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
Asha keeps moving from one side of the world to the other. Her most recent move has taken her back to Perth, Western Australia where she grew up. She lives near the beach but hates sand between her toes. It’s a real conundrum. Asha began blogging at YeahWrite in October 2014 with this post, and YeahWrite was lucky to pull her on board as a Contributing Editor in December 2016. She is currently working on a novelette that grew from a series of flash fiction pieces. Asha is published in a variety of places including Modern Loss, PANK, Dead Housekeeping, and SheKnows. You can find her inconsistent blogging at Parenting In The Wilderness, or at her fiction blog, FlAsha Tales.
