Completing The Wayward Writer!
Throughout 2023 and most of 2024, I worked through the entirety of Ariel Gore’s The Wayward Writer. I took a few weeks off here and there for vacations, but I basically spent 78 weeks working through one exercise a week. I talked a little bit about hitting the halfway point here.
Overall, I found the entire book really useful for prompting new story ideas and pushing me to look at storytelling in different ways. I finished at least 36 new poems and stories (assuming I flagged them all correctly in my tracking spreadsheet) inspired by or spun off of the prompts. And there are still a handful of pieces from the exercises that I started but haven’t finished yet, so I’ll continue working on those.
But I felt like, after checking off the final exercise, I had earned filling out the “diploma” at the back of the book, pictured here. So I guess I’m now a Myth-Rending World Maker! Off to add that to my bio!
I’ll be starting another craft exercise book soon, and I’ll report on that one when I’m done. In the meantime, if you have any questions about whether The Wayward Writer might be a good fit for you, I’d be happy to talk more about it!
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