Friday 5: Scrivening

1. What are your strengths as a writer? I really want to ask my husband because he’s my first editor and I have a hard time gauging this, I think, but he’s outside cutting grass so I’m on my own. I think I’m straightforward. I’ve been working with a lot of personal essays lately, and I have a point to make and don’t screw around getting there.
2. What are your challenges as a writer? I think sometimes I could go deeper or push farther but just get stuck.
3. When did you last write creatively? I revised an essay yesterday, but it’s been a while–a few weeks, maybe even a couple months–since I started something new and did the bulk of the writing work.
4. Which writers did you especially enjoy when you were a student? I remember in high school, one of our English teachers assigned “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury, and most of my classmates were complaining that is was dumb and I absolutely loved it. I remember liking a lot of the high-school staples like Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. College was similar–I majored in writing, which required a lot of lit classes, so I got to read and talk about books for a couple hours every day and I loved it. I learned that I like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction, despite hating The Scarlet Letter in high school. I took a sci-fi class and found Octavia Butler and Alan Moore that way. My creative nonfiction classes introduced me to David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley. And the fun thing about being a writing major is that my professors were writers, too, and although some of them talked about their own work way more than others, I did enjoy them, particularly Lori Jakiela and some of the other local writers she’d bring in, like Jan Beatty.
5. What is your handwriting like? A mess.

From Friday 5.