Writers' know-how

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On this day: 27th December 2019 -- Preverbs

On 27th December 2019 I wrote about using preverbs to break writer’s block. This is how the piece begins:

Many people advocate free writing as a way of cutting through writer’s block. Well, it’s never worked for me, and it doesn’t seem logical anyway. If you can’t think of anything to write, how would allowing your mind to just generate stuff do any good?

An alternative technique you might try is creating “preverbs”.

Preverbs is a technique used by the Oulipo. It’s one of the things I’ll be introducing people to on my course on 8th June in London: Creative writing using constraints

I’ve been writing about the Oulipo a lot over on my Eclecticism blog. One aspect in particul;ar that people seem to like is a proect called ‘experiments in style, in which I take a simple story and rewrite it in several different styles each week. Here’s the index so far: Experiments in Style Index.