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WRITER PEOPLE

Want to play a writerly game with me this month? I’m leading a project on @hitrecord with @hitrecordjoe and it’s all about fearless storytelling, practicing unlocking ideas, and learning how story-writing can be a collaborative game.

The first step is incredibly easy. All you have to do to start is to head to the site and write about a memory of yours that you would hate to lose. A happy one, a sad one, a memory that made you who you are, a memory that keeps you from being someone you hate.

Why’d I pick that opening prompt? It’s not just busywork. Even though I write novels with a ton of fantasy elements, my novels still have to feel inherently true. If there’s not a solid heartbeat of emotional honesty beneath all the magic, readers won’t bother getting emotionally invested themselves. 

Every human is a product of their experience, either running from or running to the influences that shaped them, and therefore, so is every character. The more truthful and real-life you make that emotional experience, the more readers will believe it. The more human you make your characters, the more readers will be willing to follow them anywhere. 

So this prompt — what’s a memory you’d hate to lose? Well! What better way to ask writers to practice emotional honesty than by asking them to dig into their own past and ask the hard question: what has made me who I am? What would I hate to lose?

The group nature of this project is going to be a lot of fun later, but it’s going to be cool even in these opening stages, because we’re all going to have a front row seat to the kinds of memories that all sorts of people find important. One of the most crucial things we can do as both writers and humans is learn what about our own emotional experience is exclusive to us, and learn to put ourselves in other people’s shoes instead, and the more folks who participate in this prompt, the more pairs of shoes we’re gonna see filled.

It’s going to be fun. 

See you over there for this first step, right?

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Muere mi Rostro / My face dies from Hola Combo on Vimeo.

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Dream career: that girl in Kiki’s Delivery Service who lives in the woods alone and draws birds

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This is my oasis. My heaven. My home. My life has been thrown into a beautiful whirlpool of transformation over the past few months and this has been the eye of my storm. I’m unbelievably grateful for all of it but particularly this. (at Venice, California)

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Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

Margaret Atwood (via thatlitsite)

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فلسطينية في ايطاليا ❤️

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SunSets & SunRises by İlhan Eroglu || Instragram

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’Dear George, where did you put that bone?’

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Lisa Ko at Barnes and Noble UES, 5/2/17

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This song is perfect for my current project. #amwriting

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‘Stranger Things’ Cast Vows To ‘Hunt’ Real ‘Monsters’ Of Injustice With SAG Win [x]

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Azerbaijani painter writes Quran on transparent silk pages

Azerbaijani painter and decorative artist Tünzale Memmedzade has transcribed the Quran onto transparent silk pages. Memmedzade, a 33-year-old artist, used 50 meters of transparent black silk, and 1,500 milliliters of gold and silver inks in the project, which has taken three years to complete. (read more) 

Mashallah, how incredibly beautiful. 

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i just wanna give a shout out to ever after: a cinderella story for being, even almost 20 years later, a fucking delight. 

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Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them.

Kurt Vonnegut (via wordsnquotes)

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“Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”

Woody Guthrie