Lisa Manterfield's Blog, page 11
July 16, 2015
Getting to the Heart of Reimagined Stories
I love reimagined stories, everything from Fractured Fairytales and Wishbone to Baz Luhrmann’s dark retelling of Romeo and Juliet and Seth Grahame-Smith’s twisted Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I also love dance, and one of my favorite “reimagineers” is Matthew Bourne, who’s taken stories such as Swan Lake and Edward Scissorhands and given them his own […]
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July 7, 2015
Book Love: The Girl on the Train
I’m not the first person to be enthralled by Paula Hawkins’ debut novel The Girl on the Train. A quick glance at any of the current bestseller lists suggests that plenty of other people have been sucked in to this deviously curious story. Right from the opening, Hawkins drips out tasty droplets of mystery and […]
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March 16, 2015
Eyam: The Plague Village That Inspired My New Novel
Imagine you live in an idyllic English village. Suddenly your friends and neighbors begin falling ill and dying of a deadly infectious disease. In order to stop the spread of this virus to the surrounding villages and beyond, you and your neighbors make a monumental decision. You quarantine your village; no one comes in, no […]
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March 28, 2014
Exciting News from the Contest Circuit
It’s been a wild couple of weeks for The Skeptic’s Guide to Reincarnation and I’m just now coming back to earth and taking a breath. It began last month when I learned SGR and I had made the finals of the San Francisco Writer’s Conference contest. We didn’t win, but we were honored to make […]
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March 17, 2014
Disappearing in a Connected World
I found this story of a woman found dead after five years incredibly sad and deeply disturbing. I was also intrigued. In case you didn’t see the story, a woman in Michigan was found dead in her car, parked inside the garage of her home. Investigators believe her mummified remains had been there for at […]
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March 14, 2014
Grim in My Coffee
When Harry Potter peered into his teacup during Divination and saw the dark shape of a spectral dog, he was told it was “The Grim”—the dreaded omen of death. When my coffee grinder malfunctioned (due to operator error) I was given this disturbing image: What do you think? A dark sign or, as Hermione would […]
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March 11, 2014
How Long Does it Take to “Get Over” Grief?
Earlier this year, my good friend Amy Christensen invited me to write a couple of posts for her wonderful adventure and life coaching blog, Expand Outdoors. One of the posts I wrote for her was about how running in the countryside had brought me closer to my dad, who passed away when I was a […]
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February 4, 2014
The Amigas on the Bus Go Round and Round (and I want to go, too)
I absolutely love this story in Monday’s LA Times, about the group of senior ladies that rides the local dial-a-ride bus. They use it for transportation to go shopping and attend doctor’s appointments, but mainly they ride for companionship and gossip. Here’s a snippet of the article: On a recent Friday, the women were cracking […]
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January 28, 2014
This is a test
Don’t panic if you get this. It’s just a test of the blog broadcast system.
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January 14, 2014
Why I Love Writing Classes
Having recently finished a draft of my novel, I found myself creatively tapped, to say the least. I thought I’d write some short stories, or get back into the habit of doing a daily morning writing prompt, or maybe start noodling the next book, but I soon discovered I had nothing to offer. No matter how hard I tried I was utterly uninspired.
So I signed up for a writing class.
I took a six-week class taught by Steven Wolfson at UCLA Extension Writers Program, and I’ll admit that, when I showed up on the first day, I had no idea what I was going to write about. I gave myself permission to just go with the flow of the class, without expectation of brilliance, to see what happened next.
What happened next was a LOT of writing. Being around other writers in a workshop environment, I was forced (or at least strongly persuaded) to participate in the exercises and do the homework. The prompts generated some truly rubbish work, paragraphs of pointless prose, with no narrative thrust and no hope of ever having any. But they also sparked the beginnings of some short stories and I started to notice a theme emerging. Before long, a new character began elbowing her way into my pages, and demanding to have her story heard. I suspect I’ll be writing more about her soon.
Generating new work isn’t the only benefit of taking a writing class. Here are a few others I’ve discovered over the years:
Reignite Inspiration: As in my case, sometimes even the things you love to do don’t come easily, and taking a class can help get you back on the writing rails.
Build your writing muscle: Jacqueline Winspear, bestselling of the Maisie Dobbs series, likens taking a writing class to going to the gym and working out her writing muscles. I love the image of the writerly side of my brain pumping iron.
Meet people: Writing can be a lonely line of work and sometimes my cat doesn’t want to listen to me anymore. It’s good for a writer to change out of her sweats and slippers and go out into the world sometimes.
Find fellow writers: I’ve been a member of several writers’ groups over the years and found them to be hugely helpful. I found (or formed) all those groups through people I met in class. I also connected with the people who have become my trusted beta readers.
Find out what’s going on in writing world: Classes almost always include breaks, which can be a great time to socialize and find out what other people are working on, what they’ve heard on the publishing industry grapevine, and what tools and resources they’ve found helpful.
Create time to write: Writing takes a lot of willpower and some days that’s hard to find. If you’re struggling to make time to write, committing two or three hours a week to attend a class gets you into the habit of writing consistently.
Try something fun: Over the years I’ve taken classes in memoir, non-fiction, screenwriting, and playwriting. I’m toying with the idea of a poetry class, too. It’s fun to write in a different format and it can be enlightening to see your stories told with a new slant.
In my case, taking a class provided a vacation for my brain and gave me an opportunity to explore untapped corners of my imagination. Definitely worth the price of admission.
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