You didn't think we could celebrate a whole week of Alice in Wonderland and not have a creative writing prompt to go along with it, did you? Sit down, have yourself a cup of tea, and get scribbling: Write a prose poem... Use a character from - or inspired by - Alice in Wonderland... Include... Continue Reading →

We have come to the end of our writing weekend, but hopefully this little series of exercises has inspired you to get on a regular writing routine. Because it does feel good to be creative every day, doesn't it? In case you missed them, check out the borrowed text and secrets/truths prompts of the past... Continue Reading →

Spinebreakers in the UK is hosting an awesome contest, asking you to write a short, 200-word explosive love scene between two unlikely literary heroes: What would have happened if Tess of the D’Urbervilles had met Edward? Or Mr Darcy had fallen in love with Bella? Or, come to think of it, the world was rocked... Continue Reading →

Hopefully you were sufficiently inspired by yesterday's creative writing prompt about borrowed text. Onward! Creative Writing Weekend - Prompt #2 Write what is secret. Then write what is shared. Experiment with writing each in two different ways: veiled language and direct language. Experiment as well with the form of the poem: use verse and prose.... Continue Reading →

This has been a poetry-infused week for me. I'm hoping to continue that momentum this weekend and plan on writing and revising until I have at least five solid final drafts of poems. So I thought I'd invite you to do the same. Novel Novice will have a new creative writing prompt for you, starting... Continue Reading →

Everyone has someone or something to love, whether it's your boyfriend or girlfriend, your best friend, your mom or dad, your dog, the teddy bear you sleep with every night, or your favorite slice from the local pizza shop. This creative writing prompt is about writing a love poem. Now, plenty of people hear the... Continue Reading →

Writing poems are all about revision. When I first started putting down verse, I was very anti-revision. To me, poetry was a moment of experience! A thought came to me and I scribbled it down and voila! Magic! A spontaneous explosion of feeling and meaning right there on the page! It would be inauthentic of... Continue Reading →

Most poets make use of epigraphs in their poems from time to time. An epigraph is the quotation that comes after the poem title before the verse begins, or it's the quote you may see at the beginning of a chapter or section of a book. Two things to remember: 1) An epigraph sets the... Continue Reading →

In the introduction to Poems of Paul Celan, the translator Michael Hamburger writes: Many of these persons may have no existence or significance outside the poem. It is the poem that creates them or discovers them. My happy interpretation of that? You can make stuff up if you want to. Poetic license. Create new words.... Continue Reading →

In my MFA program, we once had a long and drawn out class discussion about the font that was used in poet Lynn Emanuel's collection Then, Suddenly. The offending character that began this argument? The question mark. The font style used to typeset her book employed a question mark that was especially curly. Fat on... Continue Reading →