The Little Red Writing Book
Mark Tredinnick
Language: English
Pages: 265
ISBN: 0868408670
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Reading The Little Red Writing Book is the next best thing to participating in a workshop taught by one of the wisest, most gifted and ingenious writing teachers you could hope to find—precisely what Mark Tredinnick is.” (Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food)
Part meditation on the writing craft, part writing primer, part cry for grace, part manifesto, The Little Red Writing Book is a manual for everyone who wants to write, or has to write, and wants to do it better. It’s a book about how to make beautiful sense on paper—a lively and readable guide to lively and readable writing, creative and functional.
business-writing workshop. Twenty-six students and I are sitting in a room at the Grace Hotel. Good name, I’m thinking, for a place to study writing in. The air-conditioning is already too cold, and the jackets are coming out. I’ve spent half an hour introducing the ideas we’ll be working with, and now we’re going around the horseshoe, telling each other who we are, why we’re here and what we hope to learn. Lore 39 When it’s his turn, Andrew, a young IT professional, says this: ‘I’d like to be
The young people of today Shipshape A cleansing ale Sea change Extol the virtues Wipe the slate clean Wend your (weary) way The grass is greener Guests were treated to Mother Nature This is a dream come true Time catches up with us Fact of life Road to success Harsh reality Climbing the corporate ladder At this point in time Just take it one day at a time/play one game at time At the end of the day On a regular/daily basis The time of her life The tools of the trade Caresses
for your day job, do it for a task or hobby you love. Let’s contract We contract loads of words in speech: don’t, can’t, won’t, didn’t, hasn’t, wouldn’t, what’s, it’s, they’d, you’re, they’re, we’ll and many more. Australians do it, I notice, more commonly than North Americans. But everyone who speaks English contracts and contracts often. A contraction, to explain, is two words collapsed into one. The apostrophe indicates that (and roughly where) some letters are missing. We contract in speech
thing for me). Now try to write about the small thing with the large and hopeless thing in mind. Allow the thing you can hardly bear to think about to focus your mind on why the small thing matters (at least to you). Write the near at hand with the hopeless and distant, the intractable, in your mind.Three hundred words. What’s writing for? What makes writing worth writing—and reading—is what the story or the poem achieves beyond the tale it tells: its music, its wisdom, its form, the way it
solutions: Hell is like this. It’s this cowering in the bottom of the cellar far from the smouldering trapdoor, between pumpkins and tubs of apples. It’s the smell of a karri forest rising into the sky and the bodies of roos and possums returning to the earth as carbon and the cooking smell falling through the dimness like this.Trees go off like bombs out in the light ... —Tim Winton, Cloudstreet Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable.Tuesday follows Monday, then comes Wednesday. The