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The Daily Writer: 365 Meditations to Cultivate a Productive and Meaningful Writing Life by Fred White

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The Daily Writer
366 Meditations to Cultivate a Productive and Meaningful Writing Life
by Fred White
Writer's Digest Books, 2008
ISBN 978-1-58297-52-0
$17.99 paperback, 384 pages

Read the Introduction and two days worth of The Daily Writer. Discover how you can awaken and nurture the spiritual side of writing through daily meditation and practice throughout the calendar year. Plus see how paying attention to city sounds can give depth to your writing and learn how to savor discovering unexpected connections in your writing.

Read an interview with Fred White, author of The Daily Writer

About the Book
It isn't always easy to carve out time to devote meaningful thought and energy to your writing. Hectic schedules, distractions, and creative blocks all too often interrupt the dream-postpone it for another day.

But with 366 provocative entries-each addressing a specific facet of the writing craft, and accompanied by an in-depth reflection and a stimulating exercise- The Daily Writer provides you with easy entry points into that elusive space where words matter most and helps you to embrace writing as a way of seeing the world.

Whether you're looking for a way to better integrate writing into your life, get warmed up before you dive into a bigger work in progress, or overcome an old case of writer's block, The Daily Writer can help you establish and maintain an inspired devotion to the craft.

About the Author
Fred White, an associate professor of English at Santa Clara University in Northern California, received his Ph.D. in English (emphasis on rhetoric and the teaching of writing) from the University of Iowa. In 1997, he received Santa Clara University's Louis and Dorina Brutocao Award for Teaching Excellence. He is the author of four textbooks on writing, the latest of which, The Well-Crafted Argument, co-authored with Simone Billings, is in its third edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). Other recent books include LifeWriting: Drawing from Personal Experience to Create Features You Can Publish (Quill Driver Books, 2004; a Writer's Digest Book Club Selection); Essential Muir: A Selection of John Muir's Best Writings (Heyday Books, 2006); and Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical Currents and Crosscurrents Since 1960 (Camden House, 2008). He has also published numerous shorter works-most recently a one-act children's play, Beowulf & Grendel-an adaptation of the great Anglo-Saxon epic ( Big Dog Plays, 2007); a full-length play, Bones, based on the life of the poet John Berryman (Oregon Literary Review, 2005); plus essays, short fiction, and poetry in The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, edited by Wendy Martin (Cambridge University Press, 2002); The Chronicle of Higher Education; College Literature; Confrontation; Pleiades; Rattle; The San Jose Mercury News; and South Carolina Review. He lives in San Mateo, California, with his wife, Therese (an attorney), and their insubordinate cat, Cordelia.

Topic List for Each Month
1 Uses of Allegory
2 Contemplating Art
3 Acting Upon Your New Year's Resolution
4 Thinking about Your Readers
5 Reverence for Books and Reading
6 Brainstorming for Effective Titles
7 Creating Realistic Characters
8 Magic in the Details
9 The Art of Revising
10 Dreams: A Writer's Resource
11 Drawing from Experience
12 Giving and Receiving Feedback
13 Food for Thought
14 Researching as Searching
15 Keeping a Journal
16 Definitions
17 Listening Holistically
18 The Art of Concentration
19 Scrapbooking
20 On Motivation
21 Striving for Originality
22 Thoughts about Plot
23 Thought as Action
24 Honesty and Authenticity
25 Creating Worlds
26 On Confession
27 Adventure
28 Cultivating a Distinct Voice
29 Symbols and Reality
30 Confronting Writer's Block
31 Cultivating the Writing Habit

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366 Meditation to Cultivate a Productive and Meaningful Writing Life

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1. Choose a specific purpose. Ask them to write a persuasive, informative, or entertaining piece. They'll need to think differently depending on the purpose.

2. Choose a specific audience. Explaining something to a 3rd graders is different than a Harvard educated physicist.

3. Choose the subjects. You can give them freedom in guidelines. Give them a list of words they can use, or give them a list they can't.

4. Choose the structure. Writing a facebook update is different than writing a letter to your mom. Harness those creative/critical thinking juices by choosing a creative structure.

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Asking students to be creative is accessing multiple modes of learning. Several types of creations allow students to make personal connections they can recall when the test comes around.

Examples:

Have them write a poem.

Have them create an analogy.

Have them tell a story, using a large vocabulary word, and give that word personality traits.

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What if scenarios allow students to assess what they already know, and use it to make a judgement about how things interact. Starting each prompt with "pretend you are a CSI agent" helps them understand the task.

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Students LOVE to give their opinion. In nearly every class, you can have them evaluate a process, or a problem or question. This can engage them by having them analyze someone else's thinking. You can even have them evaluate multimedia, like videos or advertisements.