Writing Practice

Tips for Week One

Hello readers, and happy New Year’s Eve! Our month of daily Writing Practice prompts starts tomorrow, and I am very excited to write alongside all of you. Writing Practice prompts will be sent to paid subscribers seven days a week; free subscribers will get a prompt every Monday. If you’d like daily prompts, you can upgrade by clicking the button below; if you’d like a paid subscription but can’t afford one at the moment, just send me an email. And through the end of today, paid subscriptions are 20% off:

Every Sunday for paid subscribers, I’ll also send out some reflections on the previous week, and general guidance for the coming one — a few tips and thoughts that will hopefully help you to think more broadly about your writing practice and about writing as a craft. These are extremely pared-down bits of some of the writing classes that I teach on retreats; hopefully you find them both brief and helpful.

This coming week, our writing prompts will ask us to look inward and backwards, toward our roots, our histories, and our core selves. As a writer, it’s important to know where you sit in the world, and what experiences and perspectives you are bringing to your work. And that work of understanding yourself isn’t just important for people who write personal essays or memoirs; it’s crucial for journalists, novelists, columnists, and anyone who puts pen to paper. The work of understanding where you are coming from is also the early work of finding your voice(s) as a writer.

The prompts this week will ask you to explore different parts of your identity, self, and history. As you write this week, a few things to think about: