An Appointment with Emily and Your Chair: Free Writing Session

Writing, even on a good day, is hard. So how do we do it on the not-good days, on the days when it feels like the world is upside-down?

“Butt in chair” is the simple answer. We make ourselves sit down, and we don’t get up until we’ve gotten a few sentences down at the very least. But sometimes it feels impossible to even get to the chair. We’d honestly rather throw the chair out the window than sit in it.

But what if we made an appointment with the chair? And we knew that other interesting people were doing it too, at the exact same time? This free Zoom meeting is that appointment.

We’ll say hello, and then we’ll work from a writing prompt. Most prompts will be designed to help writers learn about characters they’ve already imagined and flesh out stories they’re in the midst of writing. But you can join in without having any sort of story or character in mind, too.

For about 45 minutes, we’ll work together, writing and thinking and sitting. Then we’ll come back for a quick final check-in.

Register in advance for this meeting

Note: If you enter the meeting late, everyone,including Emily, will be writing with their cameras and microphones off. Use the chat function to ask Emily to send you the prompt so that you can start writing, too

Emily Chenoweth is the author of the novel Hello Goodbye (Random House), which was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award and was named one of the top ten Northwest books of 2009 by The Oregonian. As a ghostwriter and co-writer, she’s penned a dozen other novels, many of which were New York Times bestsellers. A former English teacher and fiction editor at Publishers Weekly, Emily has also written for People, Self, Tin House, Portland Monthly, and Bookforum.