Rebeca Schiller

Alvah Bessie is Spain, 1937

Alvah Bessie Testifying before HUAC, 1947.

I thought I would share what I’m learning from the online writing course. The first lesson is about story ideas. Where do we get them. Anita offers some very good suggestions like taking classic stories and tweaking them. Changing the sex of the main character or changing his or her age. Maybe change the locale and weave in local customs. Other ideas can come from from proverbs or sayings. Or, the most obvious one write what you know best.

For each suggestion, Anita gives good examples then she provides two exercise questions. The first one asks what do I do to generate story ideas? I basically get a lot of my ideas from a

Courtesy of Flickr and V. Evangelou

I’ve been lax with my self-imposed retreat in part because I got so busy with work. However, I think I’ve managed to carve out a nice schedule for myself that allows me to get everything done for the day and week.  Thanks to this schedule, it means that I can get back to work on the creative writing, and focus on writing a short story.

I did have an issue though with the book I was working with and I felt it was too elementary in some respects. What I really wanted was to have some exercises that would actually get me analyzing and writing.  The universe must have read my mind because last week, Anita Saran, from the Internet Writing Workshop, wrote to let