• Creative Writing Exercises,  Memoir

    It’s All About Image

    I don’t remember ever planning on just being, much less being in Chengdu or even being a writer.  Yet here I am.  As an American in China I have hard time reconciling the fact that I had to come all the way to China in order to find freedom and success in the way H.D. Thoreau wrote about in Walden: I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined [emphasis mine], he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an…

  • Creative Writing Exercises

    The Mother of Books is Prompt (And So Can You!)

    They say that it takes 10,000 hours or 1,000,000 words (or some combination thereof) to master the craft of writing.  But who has time for that?  We got bills to pay, habits to feed, college loan statements to file away, the list goes on – which is why I’ve picked today to use a special technique I learned in kindergarten.  It’s called “Let’s Pretend!” For those of you from China unfamiliar with this game, “Let’s Pretend!” is one of the first tasks drilled into the little heads of foreigner children matriculating in pre-school and kindergarten.  They use their imaginations, pretending they are bourgeois scientists, astronauts, cowboys, capitalist roaders and sometimes,…