Completing Millions of Suns
Over the past several months, I’ve been working my way through Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life by Sharon Fagan McDermott and M. C. Benner Dixon. While it’s very different from the last craft book that I worked through, it includes writing exercises alongside the twelve chapters, making it a great read for authors who want to be inspired to write some things based on prompts.
Each chapter is based on a specific concept, which include emotions or things that could be considered genres, along with topics like revisions and writer’s block. Each of the authors composed an essay for each of the chapters, which sometimes cover similar territory but from their individual perspectives, and other times are divergent from one another. The essays also serve as creative non-fiction, in some regards, as they explore the concepts through non-fictional events but include a creativity of language that is inspiring.
The essays are then followed by a handful of different writing prompts tied to the concept that the chapter covered. By having multiple prompts, it seems that nearly every author will find one that resonates with them. I wound up with seven poems and two drabbles out of the exercises in the book, and interestingly, one of those drabbles started life as a poem, but in the chapter on revisions, I revised the poem into several different forms and wound up liking the drabble best. Several of the poems are more personal, literary poems, but I snuck some speculative bits in there when I could. (And there’s nothing stopping you from writing to all of the exercises with a more speculative lens, I just didn’t every time!)
I’d definitely recommend this book for authors who are interested in innovative writing prompts and new ways to think about a variety of topics. With the relatively short length of each chapter, and only twelve of them, this could be a book that you finish in about three months, or you could space it out further and do one chapter and exercise each month for a year!
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