Erika Dreifus

How’s the first official work week of 2016 treating you, my fellow practicing writers?

So far, so good for me.

For Starters

Yes, I know we’re only five days in, but so far, I’ve stuck to my new year’s intention (a word I prefer to “resolution”) to draft one new poem every day. (Haiku counts.) I’m getting up a tad earlier to try to get these poems done before I dig into the rest of the day.

I admit that last year commenced with a similar intention—which petered out around April/May. But while it lasted, it was great—I wrote A LOT of poems, a few of which, after revision, have been published or accepted for publication in 2016. (Example: “Beautiful Enough.”)

Any success here I credit to prompts. Seriously: I could not even contemplate writing a poem a day if I didn’t have all kinds of prompts bookmarked or otherwise filed away. This week, I’ve also been consulting The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano. I bought a copy for my Kindle some weeks (months?) ago, when there was a Kindle special. But I saved the book for use in 2016. (more…)