writing activity

Wounded Soul, by Arina, 14 (Iraq). Arina is in Athens with her mother, sister and brother. She loves to paint, read, swim, learn languages and go to the beach. Her art is currently up in an exhibition in Athens. She’s painted dozens of paintings and her story has brought awareness to hundreds of people around the world on 4 continents. This piece was created as part of Love Without Borders, a non-profit organization for refugees living in camps and shelters in Greece, and published through the Stone Soup Refugee Project. A note from Stone Soup Founder William Rubel Dear Friends — Well, it is again that millions of people are streaming out of cities where bombs and artillery pound people’s homes. The costumes change. The language of pain, tears, and flight does not. Here is a link to the group, Save the Children. Annual Book Contest – August 21 Deadline. It is early March, and so it is that time again—the time to announce the opening of our Fourth Annual Stone Soup Book Contest. Every year we recognize the top novel or poetry collection submitted to this contest. The first prize is for your book to be published by Stone Soup. Books by previous winners like Abhi Sukhdial, Tristan Hui, and Anya Geist, have garnered important national recognition. The deadline is Sunday, August 21, 2022 at midnight in your time zone. There is a $15 filing fee. The winning book will be published in September, 2023. Writing a book is not an easy task. I know that some of you are already working towards this contest goal, including a few of you continuing work on a text you submitted to the contest in 2022. With school and life in full swing, we know that it is going to take an extra degree of organization and discipline to get a manuscript ready to submit by the deadline roughly six months from now. As a writer myself, I can tell you that I am all too aware of the key problem with being a writer: writing does not write itself! We, the writers, can only get our work completed by sitting down at a desk and typing. Stone Soup has your back. The fabulous Naomi Kinsman, founding director of the Society of Young Inklings, a brilliant writing program for young authors, is leading a weekend workshop—Saturday and Sunday March 26 & 27, 10-1 Pacific/ 1-4 Eastern—on how to set yourself up for success as a novel writer. The workshop costs $200. However, if you cannot afford the class, then please write to Tayleigh@stonesoup.com. We want any student interested in starting a novel to be able to attend this workshop. In addition to this one-time weekend workshop, I will be holding a monthly meeting on the last Saturday of every month from March through July via Zoom at 9am Pacific for anyone who wants to meet to discuss their project with me, and to share with other writers. (For the record, I am not involved with judging the contest and do not speak with the judges about authors or manuscripts.) I am not a novelist. But, I am a working writer. I am on my third book. So I can help you with focus issues and the meeting lets you share directly with your writing colleagues. Here are the books of the past winners: Three Days Till EOC, Searching for Bows and Arrows, The Golden Elephant, The Other Realm, and Born on the First of Two. Last year’s winners—Remember the Flowers and Foxtale—are forthcoming and will be published later this year. I’d like to close this contest announcement with a general statement about contests. The primary reason to enter this contest is to provide a deadline to aim for with a project that will stretch your abilities as writers. Every novel stretches the author. First novels are especially challenging. Challenges are good. Challenging yourself is key to becoming a great writer. Every contest has an element of chance about it. Don’t write for the judge. Write to make yourself happy. That way, whether you win the contest or not, you will have created a winning manuscript. Weekend writing project. Today, I am sharing with you one project that I will be teaching as part of my writing class this Saturday morning. The writing project today is something that any of you can do whatever your age—12, 21, or, like me, approaching 70. This project is about the sound of words, and how sounds can carry feelings, even when the words aren’t real words. The trick for all writers is to say what you mean and mean what you say. But literary writers, like Stone Soup writers, have an extra task. That is to use language in expressive ways—even sometimes to use language that has some of the qualities of music. Even I will sometimes think of the past as being, well, simpler, less complex, and less daring than we are today. This is not how to think of the past! One hundred years ago there were many artists doing totally crazy things. Truly crazy things. Like, writing poems with words that don’t mean anything! Words invented for their sounds—for how the sounds make us feel—kind of like how composers choose sounds. The 1916 poem by Hugo Ball that is read in the video, below, is made up of “pseudowords.” Pretend words. The only real limit to creating pseudo words is that you create words that are easily pronounceable, slamdoodle vs. gholtzhtzlp. Please watch the poem in the video, and then, sometime this weekend, find a place and time when you can sit quietly and go into yourself to find the word sounds that will express your feelings, or the feelings of a character you may be writing about. If you are a writer, then think of this as an exercise to help you become more alert to the connection between how the sound of your story (or poem) might affect your readers. I also think that you might find that there will be a place in a story that