ix months into the pandemic, I hadn’t written a word. When I finally returned to the page, in September 2020, it wasn’t with the clarity and intention required for the essays and stories I was used to writing. Instead, my thoughts and feelings and pen meandered and explored; I wrote in a generally unfocused, sometimes […]
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Haolun Xu. Fifteen years ago, in the halcyon days of social media, book publicists began urging fiction writers to set up social media accounts, particularly on Twitter, to help promote their books. Many of the authors I knew groused that nothing worth saying could be said in 140 characters […]
fragments from a wedding ______________________________ & a funeral • my sister janice is getting married. she’s being passed around like she’s bread, & everyone’s butter, complimenting her hair, her make up, her dress: a pearl’s insides. she’s blow-fishing BIG with love— laughing HAHAHAHAHAHAHA—& you’re telling me you hate weddings. i don’t get why we still […]
Winter is a magical season that sparks imagination and invites us to embrace the joys of chilly weather. We’ve compiled a list of 22 unique Winter writing prompts to inspire young writers. These prompts will ignite their creativity, encourage self-expression, and help them explore the wonders of the season through writing. From imagining life in […]
DCU President Daire Kogh, Anne Tannam, new poet in residence, Poetry Ireland Director Liz Kelly and Mary Shine Thompson The first boy I ever loved quoted poetry. Walking side by side into town by Gardiner Street, he ensnared me with softly spoken lines: Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. READ MORE Informal […]
Treat language as a Jenga tower, moving its pieces but preserving its structure. Credit…Illustration by Chantal Jahchan Language has probably always been a slippery thing, but I can’t be alone in finding its current slipperiness particularly disconcerting. There is real, deliberate damage being done to words: A war becomes a “special military operation,” for example. […]
Faust and Mephistopheles. Painting by Anton Kaulbach, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I first discovered opera in 1991, when my tenth-grade English teacher killed a couple of class periods by showing the movie Amadeus . The bits it contained of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni were seductive enough to send me to the nearest outpost […]
ChatGPT has far-reaching uses for many writing tasks, including informative and academic essays, copywriting, social media posts, and much more. It’s also an excellent resource for playing with poetry, short stories, and even personal essays and memoirs. Here’s how to use ChatGPT as a tool to help energize your creative writing and even overcome writer’s […]
Readers like you help support MUO. When you make a purchase using links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Read More. ChatGPT has far-reaching uses for many writing tasks, including informative and academic essays, copywriting, social media posts, and much more. It’s also an excellent resource for playing with poetry, short stories, […]
IN A 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation , the opening scene features the intelligent android Data reciting one of his own compositions at a poetry recital. The first few lines give us a taste of how the writers imagined a machine-authored poem: Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous […]
