Room to Write - Softcover

Goldberg, Bonni

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874778255 ISBN 13: 9780874778250

Publisher: TarcherPerigee, 1996

Synopsis

What makes someone a writer? A writer writes, expressing the world through synthesis of mind and magic, sensuality and spirit. With both humor and reverence, Room to Write playfully prevails on us to experience the world through a writer's eyes, and respond to the creative sparks that charge good writing.

In two hundred daily essays, the author invites the reader--whether an experienced writer or someone just starting out--into the crucibles from which creative writing erupts: emotion, imagination, intellect, and soul. Once there, she urges the reader to grab a pen, grasp a keyboard, and seize the moment when perception fires revelation and language becomes art.

Each page features an essay exploring an aspect of the writing process, an exercise to get the reader writing, and a quotation to tickle the mind and keep the writing going. Ultimately, readers learn about how they write, and how to trust their intuition.

Room to Write is a collection of beguiling provocations, an irresistible invitation to all those who believe that writing, like any creative endeavor, is a way of life.

About this title

Review

Bonnie Goldberg called her compact writing workbook Room to Write, she says, "because each page is a door into one of the places from which creative writing emerges: imagination, emotion, intellect, and soul." The phrase "room to write," she adds, "also refers to creating room for your writing." Goldberg provides 200 of the page-long writing lessons, "designed to be reusable," which offer as many different ways to get into your writing. Each discusses an aspect of life and writing, followed by an assignment and an inspirational quotation from a writer or other creator. Though Goldberg tends toward the spiritual, her assignments involving things such as snot and bathrooms keep the book grounded as well. Among the more interesting assignments here are those that have you "write about the first time words profoundly affected you"; "write only lies"; "retrieve an unspoken exchange and have it out on the page"; "be exhaustive in your detailing of something ordinary, like a teaspoon"; and "write about some quality in yourself you are not proud of." --Jane Steinberg

About the Author

Bonni Goldberg is a poet and essayist. Her essays, articles, and poetry are widely published in newspapers, magazines, and journals, including The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Jewish Times, Art Calendar, Washington Review, Antioch Review, Florida Review,and Maryland PoetryReview. She is the author of a chapbook, Myths: Second Sight and In Other Words, an audio tape. Bonni developed and coordinated the Creative Writing Program for Johns Hopkins University Continuing Studies and she founded and directed the 33 Literary Series in Baltimore, Maryland. She has been selected as an NEA artist in residence for Howard County, Maryland. Bonni received her B.A. and M.A. in creative writing from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.

About this edition

• Publisher: TarcherPerigee
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0874778255
• ISBN 13: 9780874778250
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224