Daily prompt prompts me to write an entire blog post without using three-letter-words. A true challenge, particularly to a foreigner like me. Could I do that? An entire post without a single three-letter-word? We will discover quickly.
When procrastinating my days away on the internet, I came across this wonderful blog post by Shaun Levin. Shaun is an English writer. He is also a writing teacher, always exploring ways to inspire students, ways to inspire himself. When Shaun designs writing courses, he bases them on a premise: through direct experience of a city writers deepen their understanding, their experience of a sense of place, they become more aware of a city’s relevance to whichever prose genre. By writing, eating, walking, floating around a city, by being away from their desks, writers will discover strangeness in familiar objects or well-known events.
To help writers to enrich their writing with finding other ways of using built or natural landscapes, Shaun came up with an absolute brilliant plan: Writing Maps. Maps that guide writers through a city of inspiration, past characters, even through their writing life.
I ordered Shaun’s maps by sponsoring Shaun’s Writing Maps Indiegogo project. Last week, I received a first collection of maps. I used them with SCBWI’s Amsterdam Critique Group, last Sunday. We loved them! Look at what we accomplished with a simple writing prompt as ‘write your character’s entire life story in this shape’:
Writing Maps: A Character’s Life
Neat, eh?
Interested in Shaun’s Writing Maps, go to Write Around Town!
To order writing maps, go to Writing Maps!
Found three-letter-words? Tell me!
‘The’ in the start of the second paragraph! But nonetheless, an interesting post. I wish you will elaborate more about the link between sense of place and writing maps. But in the meantime, I’ll check out the links in your post!
Darn, hiddencanvas, you have an editor’s eye.
Check out the Write Around Town website. Shaun explains more about his vision and the maps there.
-Mina