Shawna Ayoub Ainslie shares meditation-inspired tips for identifying your best writing ideas and clarifying your focus.
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The Center blog is teeming with tips and inspiration for starting and maintaining your writing practice.
Have you ever needed to blend in, become part of the background? Ever want to hide? Or maybe this photo makes you think of the genius of camouflage, the relationship between living beings and our environment, or of what lurks unseen, but seeing, in the tall grass?
What do you think about when you look at this image? Write about it, then enter March's photo writing prompt contest.
Writers in touch with the sources of their inspiration are the ones who will keep writing. Stacia Fleegal offers tips for actively pursuing them, rather than waiting for them to strike, by cultivating self-awareness.
With writing, as with all people and practices that matter to us, we have to devote time and energy to maintaining their presence in our lives. Stacia Fleegal writes on how to be aware of the challenges and have a plan for balancing them.
Shawna Ayoub Ainslie reflects on how writing can be a friend in difficult times.
The coronavirus pandemic has the world in upheaval. We are distancing ourselves from others, isolating with our families, and working and learning from home. Our days probably look and feel radically different than they did even a few days or weeks ago, which might produce a great deal of anxiety, fear, and frustration.
But we will be ok.
I saw a red-tailed hawk last week, camouflaged in winter white, no red tail flashing—playing on the wind! I stopped my car on that country road where I rarely meet another traveler.
The hawk tumbled like a crow. I’ve seen crows play on the wind. This hawk wasn’t hunting. It was having a wonderful time!...
The five of us, myself and the four writers who registered for the retreat, had dined together. We then drove to the place that would be home base for the next four days: The Lazy Pond Bed and Breakfast, in the town of Liberty, New York, where I live. Lazy Pond is just down my road, but the others had traveled from all over the country.
A semicolon has been used to punctuate complete thoughts within a sentence; it is somewhat arcane, I’ve thought, and been replaced by a period or an em dash (—).
The above sentence could also be written this way:...
A beautiful snow is falling, coating everything. Here in this woods, once snow falls, in December or January, it doesn’t melt until the end of April. But this morning’s covering is fresh, fine. It may be what my farmer neighbors call a sugar snow, for the maple sap that will soon run. But I don’t know these secrets, coming from the concrete streets of Brooklyn...