Writing resources: Wake Up Writing
Need a warm-up? Try Wakeupwriting.com. They have writing exercises going all the way back to May 2002, so you’re sure to find a few neat things to try when you need to limber up or get unstuck. You can also get it as an RSS feed. (Speaking of which, I’ve finally started using Google Reader–why wasn’t I doing this before?)
If that’s not enough for you, there are 365 days of writing exercises on C.M. Mayo’s “Daily 5-Minute Writing Exercise” site.
Here’s something else you might find interesting (if edits fascinate you as much as they do me). I love Raymond Carver’s short stories, and recently The New Yorker published a document that compares Carver’s original draft of the short story “Beginners” with the final, Gordon-Lish-edited product that you may know as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” And I just love looking at this kind of stuff, comparing the changes, turning them over in my head, evaluating them, trying to see the whys and what fors. In fact, when I finally got around to reading Stephen King’s The Gunslinger a couple years ago, I did it with two copies of the book at hand–the original and the 2003 revised edition. I want to see how writers and (in the case of Carver’s stories) editors think! If you’re into that sort of stuff, here’s the piece on the Carver story in The New Yorker.
