[Interview] – Writing A Story A Day with Vanessa Matthews

if you want to stretch yourself and grow as a writer then go for it! It has been one of the most valuable learning experiences I could have had to develop my writing …it’s really infectious, once you start immersing yourself in writing, the words just keep flowing and flowing.

 

Today I’m interviewing Vanessa Matthews who has just wrapped up her own Story A Day challenge. Vanessa went one better and not only wrote a story a day but submitted one to a contest every day!

If you’ve ever wondered what you might get out of attempting to write a story a day read on!

 

WHAT’S THE MOST SURPRISING THING YOU LEARNED THROUGH THIS CHALLENGE?

Oh, to pick just one!  There have been so many learnings!!  One of the biggest lessons I have learnt is not to write about anything you don’t feel passionate about.  It might sound obvious but during my marketing career I have written with ease about things I liked, and things I didn’t like so much, so I hadn’t anticipated any problem with tackling whatever was thrown at me.  However writing for business and writing for pleasure are very different things!  If you don’t feel compelled to reach the end of your story, drop it and move on to something else.

As for surprises, I have uncovered a passion for writing poetry that I never knew I had, and based on the feedback i’ve been getting from some very talented published poets, i’m even more surprised to find that I might be quite good at it.

 

WHAT MADE YOU START THIS CHALLENGE?

I had heard about a local writing competition taking place for the Daphne du Maurier Festival, which happens in Cornwall every year, and I decided to give it a go. On further research I realised that there were an enormous number of writing competitions going on and the thought just sparked from there.  I had been plugging away at the beginnings of a novel and had found myself lacking in motivation to keep going with it.  As a busy mom of four I just couldn’t seem to find a way to prioritise my writing so this also seemed to be a good way to try and make a habit of writing a little every day.  Although ‘a little’ has so far turned out to be more than 60 pieces of writing… and that excludes my blog posts!

 

HAVE YOU WRITTEN AND SUBMITTED TO A CONTEST EVERY DAY?

Yes, with one very tiny exception… my sci-fi story competition!  sci-fi became my nemesis and despite sitting at my computer for hours trying to build a plot, I found that I just didn’t care about it enough to see it through.  I did write about 500 words and had a basic story map but I just found myself detaching from it the more I tried to write it.  I realised at that point that I was not only wasting my own time, but I was also wasting the time of the competition judges if I submitted a thoughtless piece.  I didn’t want my challenge to end up making a mockery of the art of writing by throwing together any old rubbish just so I could tick the box to say I had done it.  That would have felt disrespectful to me and all of the other writers who had entered with heart.  I plan to post a list of the competitions I have entered on my blog when the challenge is complete. Once the competition deadlines and judging periods have passed I will also post each of my entries so that you can see what I have been up to.

 

DO YOU RECOMMEND SUBMITTING STORIES QUICKLY?

In this instance I do yes.  by submitting things quickly I have forced myself to focus, choose my words carefully and get straight to the heart of what my gut instinct tells me to write.  Once finished it is very easy to overanalyse and become too self-critical but there just hasn’t been the time.  I can already look back and see how I could have done better on some of the entries, but it doesn’t matter.  I did my best on the day, and win or lose, each entry has taught me something new.  However, I would recommend taking more time if I were submitting a novel to a publisher, as you only get one chance to impress and if your story is riddled with repetition, disjointed content and grammatical errors then you won’t stand a chance.  When you are so close to your story, often its only by reading it through several times over several days that those kind of errors emerge.

 

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU HAVE FOR SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO FOLLOW YOUR LEAD?

That depends on your motivation.  If you only want to be in it to win it, then forget it, but if you want to stretch yourself and grow as a writer then go for it!  It has been one of the most valuable learning experiences I could have had to develop my writing and I have felt so creative and inspired by it.  it’s really infectious, once you start immersing yourself in writing, the words just keep flowing and flowing.  I have actually turned into a bit of an insomniac at times because I haven’t been able to quiet my imagination long enough to go to sleep.

 

DID YOU HAVE MUCH SUPPORT? DID IT MATTER?

I have been very lucky to have the support of my husband and family and made sure I had their buy-in before I started. Having a large family with young children, their support did matter, as I knew there would be times when the housework would get neglected, or I would be unavailable because I was at the computer.  But I was only asking for 30 days, and I needed to do something for myself.  Whatever your family circumstances, a challenge like this inevitably takes you through lots of highs and lows so I think it helps to at least have a cheerleader who can keep you motivated on the bad days and maybe even critique your work if you trust them to be fair and honest.   The feedback I get on my blog has also been an incredible boost, people have been so kind and have made really encouraging comments on my work which has kept me going, particularly on the days when writers block and creative insecurities crept in!

 

WHAT’S NEXT?

I didn’t think about that at all when I started, and some of that will depend if anything comes from the competitions I have entered.  Regardless of results though, I do now have a plan that I could never have anticipated.  I am writing a collection of poetry!  I have written about 20 pieces so far with another 50 or so sketched out as titles – and yes, they are all brand new poems that I have written in addition to my competition entries! I hope to submit the collection to publishers over the next few months.

 

Thanks, Vanessa! Inspiring stuff! I’m ready for May now!!

 

Vanessa has worked as a freelance copy writer, food writer, and marketing consultant for approximately 15 years.  If you want to read along through the highs and lows of one author writing a story a day, check out the blog posts as they happened. You can read more about her writing journey at her blog: http://ordinarylifelessordinary.wordpress.com/

You Can’t Write Well Without Writing A Lot

“If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story, learn from it, put it away, write another story.”
– Ann Patchett “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life (Kindle Single)“

 

I had barely started reading Ann Patchett’s short treatise on writing, when I wanted to adopt her.

We, as writers, can spend all day reading about writing (or just reading, for that matter), but there is nothing like the act of writing to teach us how to do the job.

 WRITE A LOT

And not just writing, but writing a lot.  My new buddy Ann puts it perfectly:

“Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sediment: The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap. Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stores, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the fresh water underneath.”

 

What?! There’s no reason to apologize or feel bad about all the trite, self-indulgent stories that bubble up to the surface? There is no reason to expect that any of what we write will be good, especially if it has been a while since we did any serious writing-in-quantity? We can write without being perfect? What a concept!

 TEN THOUSAND HOURS

And it’s not just m’buddy Ann.

Malcolm Gladwell points out, in his fascinating book Outliers: The Story of Success, that experts become experts not by being talented or smart, but by loving what they do and putting in lots and lots of practice. He refers to a study into musical talent and preparation by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson:

“Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur pianists with professional pianists…The amateurs never practiced more than three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and by the age of twenty they had totaled two thousand hours of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time every year, until by the age of twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand hours. The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘natural’, musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.”

 

(And you thought a story a day sounded like a big commitment!)

Gladwell applies this theory to all kinds of experts and ‘geniuses’ including Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and The Beatles.

“And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyeone else. They work much, much harder.”

THE JOY OF WORK

But don’t let that word “work” scare you. After all, you are a writer. You love to write (or at the very least, you love having written!).

The reason the Bills, Steves, John-Paul-George-and-Ringoes and Yo-Yo Mas of the world “work” so hard to become world-class at what they do, is precisely because they don’t see it as “work”. They love what they do.

 

Not every second, I would imagine — any more than you love those moments when you want to bang your head off the desk then throw your computer out of the window. But we love what we do, in the sense that we will do it forever, for the joy of it, whether or not anyone ever pays us for it.

 LEARNING TO DO IT WELL

So we might as well do it well.

The consensus seems to be that to do something well, you have to do lots of it. You have to practice. And you have to learn to love the practice, not just the promise of future rewards. Steve Jobs famously celebrated his meandering approach to education, saying that if he had never stumbled into a typography class (and loved it), the Mac would never have become what it did – and nor would Apple, and nor would Steve Jobs.

StoryADay is here to help you get back into the habit of practicing your writing. It’s not here to promise you publication, or fame or riches. It’s not here to promise you’ll write anything throughout the whole month that will be worthy of publishing. But StoryADay May is coming to help you push yourself to practice. Think of StADa as the parent who made you play scales between piano lessons; the coach who inspired you throw endless pitches at the side of your house in the evenings; the teacher who made you do fractions over and over and over again until it finally clicked and you started to see the music between the numbers.

Use StoryADay in place of the teacher Ann Patchett still celebrates for teaching her,

“..how to love the practice and how to write in a quantity that would allow me to figure out for myself what I was actually good at. I got better at closing the gap between my hand and my head by clocking in the hours, stacking up the pages.”

 

Are you ready to start stacking up the pages?

[Write On Wednesday] Location As Character

Sherlock Holmes has Victorian London.

John Irving has New England.

John O’Hara’s short stories couldn’t work without their small-town Pennsylvania backdrop.

Even fantasy settings need to feel real in order to succeed (think Middle Earth, or Earthsea, or Deep Space Nine). So today we’re going to practise writing stories in which the location is as vivid as any character.

 

And in this age of Google Maps, Wikipedia, Flickr, Pinterest, a billion hobby blogs and online tourist information sites, there is no excuse for writing a thin, anemic version of any place you can imagine. (Even if you write fantasy, you can base the details in something real.)

The Prompt

Simcoe St in Toronto

Simcoe St in downtown Toronto, ON.

  • Pick a place you have never been (preferably somewhere you have a friend – online or otherwise).
  • Spend no more than 30 minutes researching it. Use Google Street View, search for blogs based there and ‘listen’ to how its residents talk, scan newspaper archives and obituaries, look at the high school and local library’s websites.
  • Set a story in the location you have learned about. Paint a vivid picture of the place; weave it through your action; salt your character’s dialogue with local flavor.
  • Then ask your long-distance friend how close you came to getting it right? What bloopers did you make? What slang did you get wrong? Was it too generic? Was it spot on?

Tips 

  • Remember to tell a story about characters in your location. This is not a travel brochure.
  • Write fast. It’s just a fun exercise.
  • Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

  1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: Location, Location, Location!  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is to write in a concrete location! #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

See my story – and write your own, today: Location As Character at #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.


[Tuesday Reading Room] “A Telephone Call” by Dorothy Parker

A guest post by regular contributor Jami who is reading a story a day throughout 2012.. This week: “A Telephone Call” by Dorothy Parker.

This week’s post is a guest post by regular contributor Jami
who is reading a story a day throughout 2012 over at Worth The Effort. This week: “A Telephone Call” by Dorothy Parker.

Suffering.

A woman questions God about why a lover hasn’t called her at the time he said he’d call. The pleading and negotiating she does which is clearly inner dialogue is painfully realistic and honest and it exposes the vulnerable side of every woman when she is in the first phase of a relationship.

Will he call?
Should I call him?
What will he think if I call him?
Will he hate me if I call?
How long should I wait for his call?
What happens if he doesn’t call?
Why didn’t he call?

WOW, Dorothy Parker really blew me away with this story. It was made more potent with its brevity and with an ending that leaves the reader counting down the seconds until the woman makes a decision and answers her own questions.

My guess about the ultimate resolution?

She calls.
He doesn’t answer.

Here is a link:
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/teleycal.html

(c)2012 Jami Balkom

Reading A Story A Day…For A Year – An Interview

…Reading these short stories has made me realize that it’s a place I can go, a place I should go in my own fiction. …

Today I’m posting an interview with Jami, who blogs about her adventures reading a story a day in 2012 at Worth The Effort.

 

You’ll be seeing some of her posts here over the next few months, in the regular Tuesday Reading Room series. I highly recommend you visit/bookmark/subscribe to her blog. It’s a great resource and a fascinating look at the benefits of immersing yourself in the literature while continuing to write.

 

1. Why did you decide to read a story a day?

I wanted a goal, a realistic goal. Last year I committed myself to reading a novel a week but by year’s end I’d only read 41 novels [“only”?! – Ed.]. So, I wanted to do something different and my brother, who is a fantastic writer of short stories actually, encouraged me to read more short stories. Then it occurred to me that I really hadn’t balanced my reading and that shorter fiction would be a good change for me. That’s how it happened. I decided to set a goal, a short story a day for the entire year, blogging short reviews along the way.

2. How many have you read so far?

I’ve read 102 stories at this point as I’ve managed to keep up with my goal. I’ve read a short story a day for the entire year thus far.

3. Are you discovering a style you love?

Not really, or at least not as it relates to style. I do find that stories rich in tiny and interesting details keep my attention and make me want to read more. Other than that, I’m reading almost exclusively what might be categorized as literary fiction. Though I have a science fiction week planned for the month of June so we’ll see how my answer might change after that.

4. Are you trying to read outside that style anyway?

Yes, I’m always looking for new styles. Sometimes, the story I’m reading is heavy in dialogue. Other times, there is little to no dialogue but plenty of voice in the first person narrative. I like them all so long as the story itself is worth the read.

5. What patterns are emerging, as you read?

I’ve come across a lot of stories that deal with family and I find that interesting, particularly because in my own writing I’ve always shied away from those types of stories. Reading these short stories has made me realize that it’s a place I can go, a place I should go in my own fiction. And, it helps that the authors I’m reading do this very well. Judy Troy is a good example of this type of writer. I could read her stories as long as she writes them. She doesn’t bore me and I never find her writing flat. There are some though in this first 100 days that I was disappointed in and those stories consistently failed to draw me in from the start. A beginning is crucial.

6. Would you recommend other people try this? Why?

Absolutely. Reading a short story by a particular author is like getting to taste test a dish at a fine dining restaurant. Why spend the money on a pricey entree if the appetizer isn’t worth the cash you drop on it. A short story is a good foray into any writer’s longer fiction. Besides, short stories are easy to digest in quick bursts. A reader can make decisions for future reading based on these short stories. For me, that is a huge bonus.

7. What are your plans for the future?

I plan on continuing with reading a short story a day for the year 2012. I also plan to continue writing fiction daily, focusing my attention on developing and staying true to my own voice even if I am reading a different one every day. There’s also novel length fiction and I’m still reading my fair share of that as well. That won’t stop. I still plan on hitting around 25 novels this year. That’s the plan at least.

 

Thanks, Jami!

Check back in next Tuesday to read her first guest-post in the Reading Room.

Are you reading enough? Do you read short stories? Are you  reading them more as you prepare for StoryADay May?