A Writing Tip by Karen Rile
WRITE DANGEROUSLY
The best way to improve your writing is to cultivate a consistent practice. There are many ways to approach your practice, and you might change up your techniques frequently in order to keep your work feeling fresh and interesting. The most important mindset is to be both kind and firm with yourself.
This week, your job is to do The Most Dangerous Writing App every day for at least 5 minutes. Feel free to edit the timer to a longer session, up to 60 minutes (if you dare!) You can use one of the generated prompts or just start writing. And keep writing. If you pause for too long, not only will you lose momentum, your text will turn red, then blurry, and then it will disappear. The key is to keep going. You don’t have to write quickly, but you must press forward, or all will be lost.
Start a new document on the first day, paste in your results. Add each subsequent day’s results to the original doc, and at the end of the week you will have at least seven new freewrites. As far as the literary merit of your attempts: they will probably be terrible, and that is completely fine!
Ready, set, go!
Karen Rile is the author of Winter Music (Little, Brown), a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Other Voices, Superstition Review, Tishman Review, and has been shortlisted among The Best American Short Stories. Karen has published articles and essays in The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and others. She is the founding and chief editor of Cleaver and Cleaver Workshops. Karen lives in Philadelphia and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA from Bennington College, a certificate in satire from The Second City, and is a kick-ass certified LYT Method movement instructor. She is also the parent of four adult daughters with more interesting careers than her own: an aerialist, a glass artist, a violist, and a playwright. Follow her on Instagram @whatkindofdog.
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