Write, Write, Write: 7 Dynamite Instructional Articles for Those Who Want to Write Prose from Personal Experience

By Sheila Bender

This is a guide full of exercises and examples for achieving the kind of approach to writing from personal experience that will help you find wonderfully deep and surprising material! I write instruction like this every week for WritingItReal.com.I hope you'll enjoy the book!  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Writing it Real
• Release date: Mar 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781943224081

Sheila Bender

Sheila Bender's passion is helping those who want to break their writing out into new forms, revise effectively, generate more writing or facilitate the writing of others. In the last three decades, she has worked with hundreds of people helping them write personal essays, poetry, fiction, and more meaningful writer`s journals, in addition to book-length memoir and how-to books and novels. She specializes in helping people excel in their writing by allowing writing a serious place in their lives. To help, she writes an article every week for Writing It Real members as well as guest blogs for writing sites, magazines and newsletters. After publishing poems and essays in North American literary magazines and anthologies, she published her first book about writing, Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down, in 1991 with co-author Christi Killien, and since then, she continued to produce more books on writing. Currently, Creative Writing Demystified is available in e-book format and Sorrow's Words: Writing Exercises to Heal Grief is available as an ebook as well as in a print edition. Sheila and Christi, now Christi Glover, updated Writing In a Convertible with the Top Down, and made it available again in print and ebook format. In September 2009, her prose memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, was published by Imago Press. After working with many clients who were writing college (and graduate school) applications, she put her experience into the book Perfect Phrases for College Application Essays. When Chronicles Software asked if she'd write content for LifeJournal for Writers, she was eager to take the job on. In 2013, Imago Press published a collection of her poems, Behind Us the Way Grows Wider. Sheila is now working on updating her book on writing personal essays as well as one on journaling. She plans six more books on writing. You can keep abreast of her publications on her website, WritingItReal.com. Sheila has taught at colleges, universities and community centers as well as presented at national writers' programs, conferences and festivals, including the Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference, Centrum Writer's Conference, The Whidbey Island Writer's Conference and low-residency MFA program, the University of Dayton`s Erma Bombeck Conference, the San Francisco Jack London Writer`s Conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Society of Southwest Authors' Conference, Field's End, and Edmond's Write on the Sound. Each year, since 1997, she has been joined by a renowned faculty for the Writing It Real Writers' Conference. She also joins other colleagues in presenting around the country and abroad. You can read about the workshops and conferences at WritingItReal.com Online, she offers classes and tutorials through WritingItReal.com as well as several other sites. For a list of her coaching, mentoring and one-on-one editing services visit WritingItReal.com. So many of us write more completely, more regularly and with more incentive to explore if we know we have a class, coach or editor (even all three!) waiting to hear from us. Browse Sheila's site to learn about the ways she can help you.

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Write, Write, Write

7 Dynamite Instructional Articles for Those Who Want to Write Prose from Personal Experience

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Sheila Bender

Writing It Real

Writing It Real

394 Colman Drive

Port Townsend, WA 98368

www.WritingItReal.com

[e-mail]

© 2017 Sheila Bender

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-943224-05-0

eISBN: 978-1-943224-03-6

eBook edition: 2016

print edition: 2017

Interior: Marcia Breece

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Books by Sheila Bender

Sorrow’s Words

Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down: A Unique Guide for Writers

A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief

Behind Us the Way Grows Wider: Collected Poems 1980 – 2013

Creative Writing Demystified

A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery

Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from Your Life Experiences

Perfect Phrases for College Application Essays

Writing Personal Essays: Shaping and Sharing Your Life Experience

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Introduction

Dear Readers,

One of the many things I love about writing is the companionship I feel with other writers as I write. For me, it is as if all of us are in one long literary conversation building a vast pool of experience, opinion and insight.

Feeling like I am writing in the company of the writers whose work I read is like talking with good friends about what is on my mind and in my heart. It helps me think about what is meaningful to me. The writing I read by other writers provides me with an opportunity to explore strategies to further investigate what I find meaningful. The strategies that I find in others’ writing, and sometimes combinations of them that I put together, help me get started with my own writing using structures that help me find material and fresh insight.

For this book, I have chosen seven of the many instructional articles I have written over the last dozen years. I hope the models and my prompts in the articles offer you good company as you write and that you find surprises in what you have to write.

I’d love for you to visit WritingItReal.com and become acquainted with the many types of articles and resources I offer the community of Writing It Real members. You’ll find information about my books, articles, online classes, in-person seminars and conferences, one-on-one coaching and writing tutorials as well as an archive of radio interviews I have done with scores of poets, writers, playwrights, editors, publishers and others involved in the writing life.

If it’s time for you to put your words down and mine and share their wisdom, humor, and experience, this short book and the rest of what Writing It Real has to offer are definitely for you.

Yours,

Sheila Bender

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Learning Words by Heart

Organize Your Experience Through the Lens of Randomly Chosen Words

A few years ago, I invented a way of coming to writing during times when I felt overwhelmed by my need to write, yet stuck in my ability to get anything of value on the page. The exercise I invented ultimately helped me to create vignettes, essays, and poems from life experience when I had no idea what would come forward on the page or how to find my way into my own heart and thoughts.

I call the technique Learning Words by Heart. This exercise relies on organizing experience through the lens of randomly chosen vocabulary words. Because I started with an unexpected and unfamiliar word, I found that I would easily and almost automatically associate the meaning with some event or situation in my life experience and then arrive, through