The first restaurant I worked in was an American-style family restaurant – pretty exotic for the southwest coast of Scotland in the 80s, a place festooned with fish’n’chip shops, where ‘chicken tenders’ sounded like a new language.
One of my jobs was to set out bowls of condiments before the customers came in…and not just salt, pepper, vinegar, and the two sauces known to us (red and brown), but things like ‘hamburger relish (it was green! Who had ever heard of such a thing?!) and three types of mustard: one classic yellow, one fancy ‘Dijon’, and one totally alien grainy concoction that I fell in love with.
Tonight, I opened a jar of that grainy mustard and its tangy smell transported me back 38 years, to the service corridor between the kitchen and dining room of my first job, when mustard was an exotic new experience.
It reminded me of a truth in writing: we spend so much time in our own heads that we take for granted the way we think, the way we talk, and the way we write.
Sometimes, when we show our work to someone else they are thrilled by a throwaway phrase or a description that took no effort at all…because it’s normal to you.
Sometimes we need other writers to push us to try the mustard, when we’re accustomed to always reaching for the salt and vinegar.
And yes, this is my fancy way of letting you know that Critique Week is coming up, and that if you would like to get some fresh eyes on your writing you should consider joining us.
But more than that, it’s my way of encouraging you not to take your own writing for granted. It might be the new flavor someone else is looking for!
Keep writing,
Julie
P. S. I’ll be opening up registration for this round of Critique week, soon. Get on the waitlist here.
If you want to improve your writing you know you have to revise your writing. But, in my work with writers I encounter a lot of resistance when it comes to revision.
Some of this resistance comes from myths around the best way to revise and edit your own writing.
1. Revision is all about seeing where you’ve failed
It’s not.
As I talked about last week,seeing where you’re succeeding can be just as important, if not more than seeing what’s not working. You don’t want to cut out your best lines!.
It can be helpful to get other people to look at your work, both for a fresh pair of eyes on a project we may be too close to, and because we do tend to be a little hard on ourselves.
Experienced writers tend to have a well-developed sense of what’s working in their writing as well as what’s not…but it’s not flawless and we all need a little feedback from time to time.
And when you DO find something that needs to be reworked (let’s not call it a ‘failure’) work on celebrating.
Seeing what’s not working gives you an opportunity to fix it.
Going back to older stories and noticing what’s not working, is a measure of how far your skills have advanced.
So celebrate!
2. You must walk away from your work for two weeks, before you revise
This post came as a response to a question I posed about revision: how you approach it and how you feel about it. This answer was so good, I asked Tony if I could repost it here.Thanks Tony!
I have no trouble revising my work. I usually want it to be as good as possible.
I have no problem revising my fiction. My problem is deciding when to STOP tweaking it.
I revise to catch errors, of course.
I revise to catch overused works and sentence structure. (No semi-colons allowed, and few colons.)
I revise to even out the pacing. (One scene may resolve too quickly. Another may get more space than the scene deserves.)
The online workshop will happen on April 22, 2017 from 4 PM until late.
There are 10 tickets for full workshop participants (writing exercise, critique and discussion) and 40 reduced-price tickets for audience-only attendees.
This month’s theme, here at StoryADay is “Accountability”.
(If you haven’t yet declared your goals for the month, leave a comment in this month’s SWAGr post and tell us what you’re going to do with your writing for the rest of this month)
Today’s writing prompt includes a built-in accountability trigger.
The Prompt
Contact a friend, right now, and tell them that you’re going to write a short story in the next 24 hours. Tell them you’ll send it to them, or at least check in when you’re finished. Then, write 500-750 words about a character you think that friend will love (or love to hate)
Tips
Keeping the story super-short gives you a better chance of finishing it
Focusing on your friend (someone you know well) helps you winnow the choices. What will THEY enjoy? (Too much choice is paralyzing. Eliminate every possible character or situation that wouldn’t interest this particular friend. Then start writing)
Remember that a short story revolves around a single moment in which something changes for your character.
The moment can have happened just before the story starts (in which case you’re dealing with the aftermath and the character’s choices about how to deal with it)
The moment can happen at the end, when we know enough about your character to be able to predict how they’ll react (or at least enjoy wondering)
The moment can happen in the middle, in which case you get a chance to show us the before and the after.
With such a short story you don’t have much room for backstory. Write it as bare as you can. You can punch it up with details and dual meanings, as you re-read and re-write it.
I talk a lot about writing prompts and Story Sparks around here. They are your secret weapons for getting through a month of extreme short story writing!
What is a Story Spark?
It’s a term I coined for something that is less than a story idea and certainly not an outline, but something that you notice while walking the world: things that make you go ‘hmmm’, if you will.
Story sparks are details about the world that you can use either to spark or add richness to a story. They can be:
Fragments of conversation: become a dedicated eavesdropper, if you aren’t all ready.
Details from the world around you: the exact color and shape of a dogwood flower in April; a snippet of conversation overhead, out of context; the rhythm of a 14 year old girl’s speech,
Big Ideas that occur to you randomly: the ‘where are all these people going?’ that pops into your head while you’re sitting in traffic; what if my baby had been born with wings? why do so many of us believe in a deity?.
Memories: spend some time going through old memories and pulling out interesting characters, conflicts, fears, hopes, joys. Gather some of them as Story Sparks.
Some of these, with a little interrogation and development could be come a story or a series of stories, but for now they are simply ideas that flit across your brain.You needn’t have any clue what kind of story they’ll fit into or how you might use them.
Capture them.
Save them for later.
How To Harness The Power Of Story Sparks
To feel the power of Story Sparks you must gather them continuously.
Set yourself a goal of gathering three story sparks every day and you will find yourself seeing the world in a different way (a writer’s way).Aim to have 15 at the end of each week, but don’t collect them all on one day.
By getting into the habit of observing the world around you and capturing story sparks daily, you are training your brain to see the world through an artist’s filter. This will help immeasurably when you sit down to write.
Writing Prompts Are Not Story Sparks
(At least not the way I do them here at StoryADay)
I provide an optional writing prompt for every day in May (If you want to support the challenge and give me a pat on the back, you can grab a copy of last year’s prompts here or stay tuned for the release of this year’s prompt ebook)
My writing prompts are intentionally vague.
I don’t know if you prefer comedy or tragedy, sci fi or contemporary romance. I don’t know if you’re a woman or a man or a child or a nonagenarian. So I keep the prompts vague. Here’s an example:
I’m not giving you a topic or a character or telling you where to set your story. I’m giving you a way into a story.
This is the perfect time to start digging around in your Story Sparks notebook/file and see what might fit with this prompt. Choose a Spark that leaps out at you today, in today’s mood, with today’s time restrictions and today’s challenges.
I also give you tips everyday. They are intended to help you drill down further into the prompt, and figure out how you can make it work for you.
Here’s another example:
Notice, I don’t tell you what kind of character to choose or where to place him/her. That’s up to you. Dig into your Story Sparks and see if you can find inspiration for a character who might have these qualities.
Here are the tips I provided for this prompt:
Again, you’ll need to bring your own ideas to this exercise. It’s not a scenario that dictates any details about the story, but rather a prompt; a way into finding a character and a story that matter to you.
And that is the only way to write a story that matters to readers.
So go now and start collecting Story Sparks: 3 a day. You’ll thank me, around May 14, when the creative well is not only dry but cracking and threatening to implode.
A few reasons: One is that it keeps things simple for me. There’s a lot going on around here in April/May and setting up an ebook with three or four different vendors is a LOT of work. I like Amazon. You can get it for Kindle or use their browser-based Kindle app at no charge.
Another is that Amazon is a big kahuna. If lots of people buy the ebook from Amazon (especially if you all buy it on opening day) the ebook shoots up the charts and gets more exposure, and more people hear about StoryADay, which makes the community more buzzy and you more likely to find a writing friend you lurve. (See? It’s all about you).
Thirdly (and this one is less about you), Amazon pays well. If I use their Kindle Direct Publishing and make the book exclusive to them, I get 70% of the list price in royalties in every international market they cover. This money all goes into the running of StoryADay (so actually, it is about you!).
Speaking of money: I intend to keep the StoryADay May challenge free forever. But running it is not. In addition to the hundreds of hours I spend working on this every year, I have hosting and domain-registration costs, support for the times when the web coding gets too much for me, the Mailchimp email list hosting (we’re such a big tribe now that we’ve outgrown Mailchimp’s free service); hosting fees for the service I use to sell workshops and ebooks, and on and on the costs go. I’m fairly frugal but the costs run over $1000 a year.
If everyone on the mailing list bought a copy of the ebook on release day I would cover my costs and have a bit left over to make the site prettier and more functional next year.
That won’t happen, but every little bit helps. If you do feel like kicking in a few more dollars of support, don’t forget about the StoryADay Shop, which is full of books, writing workshops and the world-famous StoryADay I, WRITER Course – six weeks, ten stories, one new writing life).
So there’s my Amanda-Palmer-inspired begging bowl. Want to support StoryADay? Buy an ebook, course or workshop. Or, if money is tight, spread the word to your writer friends. Get them involved in StoryADay. That’s as valuable to me as a monetary contribution! And more fun.
OK, this was a long post today. Sorry about that, and thanks to anyone who’s still here at the end of it!
Now that you’re all keyed up to write, we turn to the tricky question of how to take all your good ideas and turn them into story drafts.
From Idea To Story
Ideas are great.
Story Sparks are great.
Writing prompts can be great.
But anyone can have an idea.
It takes a writer to develop and idea and turn it into a story. Yeah, uh, how do we do that, then?
The Right Way To Write A Short Story
There is no one right way to write a short story.
That’s the beauty of the short story. It can be anything from a classic three-act narrative to a loosely connected collection of nouns verbs and prepositions.
There are as many ways to write a short story as there are writers. The only right way to write a story is to tell it the way you want to tell it.
Writing a short story that readers want to read, however, is a little more limiting.
1. Play With Structure
Short stories don’t have to follow a particular structure. With a short story you can forget about plot diagrams and character arcs and still end up with a satisfying story.
Why? Because short stories exist to immerse a reader in a moment in a character’s life. Or to make them question an assumption by illustrating its absurdity in miniature.
A list can be a short story. A diary entry can be a short story. A tweet can be a short story. But none of them work without the active participation of the reader.
Think about it: in writing short stories, you have to leave a lot out. You can’t spend a lot of time describing the six layers of undergarments worn by ladies of the court, the way you can in a novel. You can’t give much (any) backstory. You can imply, hint and leave spaces.
It’s up to the reader to slow down, pay attention and supply those details. In that way, the short story is a lot like poetry.Even as you play with the structure you must write for the reader.
2. Write For Readers
I don’t mean ‘write for acquisition editors and publishers’. I mean write for your ideal reader.
Readers expect certain things in a story. They expect setting and character and something to happen. Depending on your reader’s preference and tolerance level, they may expect suspense (or not), character development (or not), and a resolution of sorts (or not).
Literary fiction can get away with more of those ‘or not’s than genre and mainstream fiction. Mainstream readers tend to be looking for a less intense escape from reality than literary readers who are willing to study every line as if there’ll be a test on Friday (which they intend to ace.)
But it’s OK for even mainstream or genres readers to expect their readers to participate in the story.
What Do You Mean, Readers Have To Participate?
Read this oft-cited example of the shortest-short story:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
So what? On one hand, it’s just a classified ad. But if you, the reader really start to think about it, you start filling in the details: why the shoes were never worn; who might have placed the ad; and inevitably, how they must have felt, doing so.
You, the reader, are telling the story in cooperation with the author.
This is a pretty extreme version, of course. But you should be aiming for the same effect in every story you write, no matter its shape or length.
I’ve been hosting StoryADay since 2010 and I’ve read a lot of stories in that time. The stories that immerse me in a character or a world or a moment are the ones that stay with me. The stories that ask a question and make me care about the answer (whether or not they supply it) are the ones I seek out and re-read.
So how do you take an idea (either from your own head or from a writing prompt, or from some combination of the two) and make readers keep wondering about it long after they’ve stopped reading the words on the screen?
3. Ask Questions
If you start with in idea about a particular character or setting, next ask yourself “who cares?”. Who will be interested about a story about that character or setting?
Then ask “why”? What makes this situation different? What makes this person interesting?
For example, The Care And Feeding of Plants by Art Taylor, opens with two people who are having an affair, one is married, the other is not. Ho-hum, right? Except that “During one of their trysts…Robert told Felicia to bring her husband over for a Friday night cook-out.” Wait, what? DURING? What kind of people are these? I don’t know about you but I had to keep reading!
Next take your idea and ask yourself “if…then” questions.
In the example above the author might have asked himself: if the husband does come over, what could happen? If the wife refuses to invite him, then what happens? If the lover changes his mind, then what? Follow this line of reasoning down its most interesting, tangled alleys and see what you can come up with. (If you’re like me you’ll need to start writing round about now, because you’ll be too excited not to!)
4. Leave Gaps
Not literally (though maybe, depending on your story). But leave gaps, as in the six word short story above, and readers will start to ask the questions you leave lying around for them to find.
It might not be necessary to tell readers in the first sentence why your character is standing on a bridge, wind whipping her hair around her tear-stained face, one hand on the thin guide rail behind her. Just put her there and then make us care. You can supply the reasons (or not) later.
You might not need to walk through your character’s entire day to make poignant the moment when they walk through the front door of their home, mussed-up and frazzled.
Think about the minimum amount of information you can give the reader in order to pull them in, and keep them interested, yet still give them room to search for clues in the context as to what’s really going on in the story.
In “Orange” by Neil Gaiman, the entire story is told as a set of responses to questions that the reader never hears. Bob Newhart did a series of comedy sketches based on a one-sided phone call (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnO1lnPH3BQ). He never tells us what happens at 1:41, but I’ll bet you, along with the laughing audience, can guess. You can replicate these ideas or you can use them to remind yourself to leave some things unsaid in your stories, to draw the reader in.
5. Try Something New
If you always write narrative stories with a character encountering an obstacle that clashes with their desires/needs, take a break. Try something different. Instead, write a story made up only of dialogue, or in the form of a memo to the staff, or a series of social-media posts or voicemails.
Challenge yourself to create complete characters or illustrate an absurdity, without talking directly to the reader.
As you write, keep asking ‘what if’ and ‘so what’ questions of your ideas.
6. Getting Unstuck
There’s a point, somewhere in the middle of every story, where it’s very easy to get stuck.
You’ve set up the characters and the situation, but now you’re starting to get tired and the thought of fighting your way to the end (with all the digressions that crop up as you think of objections and things you’ve left out, and things you want to explain) is just too much to bear. (A bit like that sentence.)
At this point, we go back to the questions.
If you don’t know what should happen next, ask yourself: what does your character want? What is standing in her way? How can you make it worse? What is she not prepared to do? Can you force her to do it? How can you resolve the reader’s question of “does she get what she wants” as quickly as possible?
If you’re really stuck, simply finish your sentence then write the words “But then” Finish that sentence and write: “And so” Finish that sentence. Repeat as necessary. You can edit out these phrases and clean up the prose in the rewrite (what else do you have to do in June?), but sometimes a crude, structural approach forms the foundation of a what turns out to be a strong story.
7. Keep Writing
If you are really stuck, the only thing to do is to write. Not brainstorm. Not diagram. Not sketch ideas. And certainly not turn to the next, bright shiny idea.
Write your way out of the problem and get to the end of the story.
It’s a short story. What do you have to lose? No one dies if you get it wrong. No one even needs to see it. But by finishing it, you will have learned so much more than if you give up.
I promise you, from bitter, joyful, exhausted experience, this is the truth.
Use the tactics in this article to blast past your fear, push through the mushy middle, and get to the end of today’s story. It might be a mess. It might be the foundation of something great. It might be a complete mistake.
But the biggest mistake of all is to stop writing.
Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living.
-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost
Tomorrow we talk about how the heck you keep doing this over and over again for 31 days in a row. With tips from past “winners” (Plus: how to be a winner even if you don’t write 31 stories)
At the end of this week I’ll be telling you about how you can get your hands onAvailable now a tool to help you sit down and write every day: the 2015 StoryADay Month of Writing Prompts ebook.
[South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone] revealed that although they brainstorm and develop individual funny scenes, the key to turning those scenes into an actual story is in making sure that each scene causes the next scene to occur.
…[they] developed a very simple litmus test for determining whether they had achieved the desired causation between scenes, by seeing whether one of two words could be inserted between each scene:
This seems like a wonderful lesson for short story writers.
We don’t tend to think in scenes (especially in a first draft), but applying this test to your story revisions, will make the difference between it being ‘a bunch of stuff that happens’ and ‘an actual story that pulls readers from the first word to the last and leaves them daydreaming about your characters later’.
Key point: as you revise (or draft) your short story, think about everything that happens and whether each is linked by a ‘therefore’ or a ‘but’.
Read the source article for four more lessons on storytelling from South Park.
I find it useful to read case studies from people who have actually WRITTEN books (and possibly had them published and worked on a sequel). Theory is all very well, but hearing from someone who has actually done it? Much more inspiring. They also tend to be more passionate, less forgiving and much, much more practical.
Photo by noor Younis on Unsplash
Here are a bunch of articles from working writers who answer the second-most-asked question they hear. [1. The first, of course, being “where do you get your ideas?”]
Jon Scalzi is a speculative fiction writer, Hugo award winner and creative consultant on the SyFy Network’s Stargate: Universe. He wrote an energetic answer to the time question which includes this choice paragraph,
There are lots of things I think I’d like to do, and yet if I don’t actually make the time and effort to do them, they don’t get done. This is why I don’t have an acting career, or am a musician — because as much as I’d like those, I somehow stubbornly don’t actually do the things I need to do in order to achieve them. So I guess in really fundamental way I don’t want them, otherwise I’d make the time. C’est la vie.
Jackie Kessler has written 12 novels (not all of them published, but hey, that’s a lot of writing time) and refuses to apologize for taking time to write [link no longer valid].
Screenwriter John August shares his work-a-day experience of becoming a professional writer. (“my general point is that you need to actively clear time in your day to write, which means giving up something.”) It’s not sexy, but it worked.
Chip Scanlan talks about writing in small chunks, lowering your standards, rejecting the Soup Nazi.
And to finish things off for today:
Joanna Penn, The Creative Penn (@creativepenn on Twitter) shares this personal story, which debunks the ‘if I only had time’ myth a bit:
I once decided that I needed time to write my book. I had some money from the sale of my house, took 3 months off and tried to write every day. It didn’t work. I didn’t have anything to show for it, and went back to work disheartened at my inability to write. It was 4 years until I actually decided to try again.
Then I wrote “How to Enjoy Your Job” in 9 months of evenings, weekends and days off while working fulltime.”.
You can find the time – you just need to re-prioritise!
One of my main aims with StoryADay.org was to get you (and me) writing again. It’s about productivity, creativity and becoming the person you were meant to be: a writer.
But after you’ve been writing for a while a new worry creep in. You’re no longer worried about making time to write, or whether you’ll be able to finish stories. You’ve proved that you can do that. You’ve probably found that you’re much happier when you’re writing than when you’re not.
Then comes that next niggling worry.
(And yes, it hit me too, after I’d first used StoryADay to jumpstart my own short story writing).
And what is that worry? All together now:
“What if my writing isn’t good enough?”
Facing Reality/Changing Reality
If you’ve been writing for a while now, you’ve probably sent a story or two away to a publication, a contest, a friend. Maybe you had some luck and got a good response. Chance are though, you to a ‘sorry but’, or an empty inbox.
It’s hard to know why. Maybe it wasn’t what that person was looking for. Or maybe it really wasn’t good enough. So now what?
As I see it, you have three choices:
1. Give up (but that’s not a real choice because you already know you want to be writing. So let’s forget I ever mentioned it.)
2. Never show your work to anyone again (but this isn’t realistic either. We write to connect. You WANT to find an audience for your work.)
3. Become a better writer.
Let’s Do It
Every writer has to face this reality, when the first euphoria wears off: we’re not as good as we want to be. Everyone. From Stephen King to Junot Diaz (who got a McArthur “Genius” grant this year. Think that’s going to make feel like he knows what he’s doing? Nope!)
It’s all just part of the process of becoming a writer.
So it’s noses to the grindstone again: write, read, revise, learn, do it all again. The only way forward is, well, forward.
A Free eBook For You
Earlier this year I posted a long series of articles on the subject of Becoming A Better Writer. They were so popular that I decided to expand them, compile them, and release them as an ebook: the second in the StoryADay.org Guides series.
This guide to becoming a better writer is packed with tips, techniques and exercises you can use to improve your writing– even when you’re away from your desk. With StoryADay’s trademark brand of inspiration, practical help, and humor, this is your go-to guide for whenever your writing life needs a boost.
What’s The Catch?
Well, none really. You need to have a Kindle or download the free Kindle software from Amazon, and I’d love it if you’d leave a review so that more people can find the book next week when the price goes back up to $2.99 (Any kind of review helps. I think it potential readers like to see a balanced set of opinions up there) .
Which reminds me, it’s only free until Friday, July 19th, so get your copy today.
I’m all for big dreams and Big Hairy Audacious Goals (A term coined by Jim Collins in “Built To Last”: ) After all, I’m the one who set herself the goal of completing a short story every day in May!) but not all goals are appropriate at every stage in our development.
What Is Success?
Maybe you will get published in Granta or Ellery Queen or McSweeneys one day. But if you’re still grappling with so-so feedback from your writers’ group perhaps today is not that day. That doesn’t mean you can’t shoot for a closer target. Perhaps you can submit to a smaller-circulation market, a newer publication that hasn’t attracted as much attention yet, a regional contest or anthology.
Or maybe you don’t need to ‘be published’ at all right now.
Reasons Not To Publish
Perhaps your version of success is ‘good feedback from my friends’. Perhaps you want to put together a collection of your stories and have it bound by a print on-demand publishing service to leave to your heirs.
Perhaps you can dedicate the next year to writing and revising rather than submitting stories, freeing yourself from the pressure of thinking about ‘success’ in terms of ‘acceptances’. File your stories chronologically and, at the end of the year, look back and see how far they have come. Then—and this is crucial—review your progress and decide what your next set of goals should be. Base your decision on where-my-writing-is-now rather than where-I-wish-it-was.
Reaching and Stretching
Whatever you decide to focus on, try to set your expectations at a level just a little beyond your current abilities. Give yourself something to strive for, but don’t set yourself you up for failure.
Having Said All That…
– Don’t let your inner critic obscure all that is good about your writing.
– Don’t let fear hold you back from finding out if your writing really IS ready for the big leagues.
– Don’t be timid in the face of challenge.
– Do set yourself ‘stretch’ goals that push you to improve.
– Do allow yourself to dream about your perfect reader, curled up in a comfy chair somewhere, transfixed by your stories, feeling the same joy you feel when you read a really great story.
– Do work hard towards your goal of being the best writer you can be.
– Do keep writing.
This post is part of the Becoming A Better Writer series. Find the other parts here or buy the ebookand help support StoryADay May:
After that you can start worrying about critiques and editors and agents and publishing and publicity.
But all of that is secondary to the writing. To become better at writing you must sit down and spin tales, craft stories, put words on the page.
The world is awash in articles, books and courses on how to manage the business of a writer’s life. You can find all the advice you will ever need and more on how to make time to write, how to write when you don’t have time, how to write better, and on how to find critique partners, find agents, find your audience.
The more important question is: Can you find the will to sit down and put words on the page day after day after day?
This post is part of the Becoming A Better Writer series. Find the other parts here or buy the ebookand help support StoryADay May:
If you’re a self-starter, consider the feedback you’ve had and plug those terms (“realistic dialogue”, “character deveopment”) into a search engine. Seek out insightful blogs and articles to help you improve those areas in which you are weak.
Read blogs by successful writers who are further along the path to you. Many published writers are extremely generous (if sporadic) in their blog posts. Check out the blogs (and their archives) by Neil Gaiman, Jane Espensen, and more.
Commit to reading about writing over the long term, and dismiss the urge it raises in you to whine “I’ll never be able to…” or “I’ll never be as good as…”. If you do keep reading and listening for months and years, you’ll find that you’ll learn more and despair less.
Don’t be afraid to specialize. Don’t take a generalized ‘short story writing’ class if you’ve come to realize that what you need help with is dialogue.
Likewise don’t be afraid to reach outside your specialty. If you see an interesting drama workshop or screenwriting class about “action and suspense”, give it a second look. If you are interested, you’ll get much more out of the class than if you are taking it because you just feel you ought to.
If you like the classroom feel, but can’t get to an online or real-world class, look out for ‘home-study’ workbooks and e-books that are structured on a class format, with weekly (or daily) assignments and lessons. Set yourself a deadline and, better yet, see if you can get a writing friend to go through the course with you, to simulate that in-class experience.
CopyCat Writing
This is one of the most popular segments of the I, WRITER Course that I run each year before StoryADay May.
During the Renaissance — the great flowering of European art and culture during the 16th and 17th centuries — great artists and artisans enrolled apprentices to train with them. The apprentices learned the principles of their craft not by creating their own unique works but by painstakingly copying the works and style of their masters.
We can do this in writing too (just as long as we don’t attempt to get any of our trainee copycat work published. That’s a plagiarism scandal just waiting to erupt!).
Take a story by a writer you really, really admire — preferably a short short story that won’t take for ever to reproduce. Analyze it in minute detail: from word choice to sentence length. Now, choose a different setting and different characters with different dreams from that of the originals, and write a copycat story, following the exact structure and tone of the original.
(If you want more details about this, and examples to follow, consider signing up for the I, WRITER Course I run several times a year.
Keep Learning
Nowt hat you have some great sources for how to learn from the greats, there is one final thing to realize:
You are never going to be finished.
You will grow and change as a writer as long as you keep doing…and every stage is going to require more learning, more inspiration and new heroes.
Commit to learning about your craft for as long as you are doing it, and you’ll be firmly on the path taken by all your writing heroes.
This post is part of the Becoming A Better Writer series. Find the other parts here or buy the ebookand help support StoryADay May:
If you want your writing to improve, it’s always a good idea to set a piece aside for a while and come back to it later.
But sometime, not even a month’s Time Out in the dusty recesses of your hard-drive is enough to separate your story from your hopes for it, and the only way to get some perspective is to show it to someone else.
The real benefit is not just in plucking up the courage to show your writing to another soul (though that’s powerful). It’s in knowing how to listen to and act upon their feedback.
How Not To Take Feedback
Recently, at my Real-World Writers’ Group’s critique session, I listened as a high-energy, opinionated novelist read out a sample of her novel, which was similarly high-energy and opinionated. It was also funny and well-crafted and she was clearly at the stage where she needed feedback only on errors, omissions and clarity. So we waded in: “You said she was standing on the other side of the minivan so how did he see her?”, “Oh, I do that hobby and there’s a detail you missed.”
It was good stuff and just what she needed. But every time someone offered a critique or asked a question, the writer cut them off with a defense of why she had written it that way and prefaced most of her comebacks with, “Well, what you don’t understand is…”.
I started to wonder a, why she had come to the group, and b, how she ever hoped to get this promising manuscript published if she was unwilling to take feedback. (I had a sudden vision of her trying to follow all her readers home from the bookstore, calling out “Now, don’t forget, when I say that Marianne is biting her lip, that means she’s happy, not that she’s nervous. And the dog is symbolic. Symbolic!!”)
If It’s Not On The Page, It’s Not In The Story
If readers ask you for clarity about a story detail, a character or an event, it means something is missing. Listen to them, make notes and then go away and figure out a way to include more information or clues right there on the page.
If your story has too little (or just as likely: too much) of something, remember that this is not the end of the world. It doesn’t mean you stink as a writer. It doesn’t mean you’ll never be any good. It just means you have some more (re)writing to do. And that now you know what you have to do.
Rejecting Feedback
Just as important as listening to and acting on feedback, is the ability to decide you’re not going to act on it.
I like to write stories with twists at the end. I like science fiction. I like humor. So I took along a funny (I hoped), twisty, vaguely-sci-fi story to my writers’ group’s critique night recently. I was pleased to get a few laughs and some smiles, but I also noticed that one of the women in the group was smiling extremely politely and blinking a lot. I gave her an encouraging look and took a deep breath. When she prefaced her remarks with,
“I’ve never read any science fiction and I really prefer slice-of-life stories…” I knew what was coming next. She didn’t get it and had no clue what had happened at the end of my story.
Of course I was disappointed. And of course I wondered if I should make the twist in the tail more obvious. But I also happened to have another person in the group who knew exactly the kind of story this was supposed to be and who enjoyed those kinds of stories. That feedback was, naturally, very different.
I was interested in the feedback of the more ‘general fiction’ reader, but I gave more weight to the critique of the group’s lone sci-fi fan with the great sense of humor who thinks the ending was skating on just the right side of ‘predictable’.
Listen. Take notes. Consider the source. Go with your gut.
How To Find Critique Partners
If you’ve read this far and are thinking “well, that’s all very well, but how do I find these thoughtful, insightful critique partners?” here are a few idea.
Connect With Other Writers
Readers are wonderful people (I’m one of them), but if you pass a story to the most avid reader who doesn’t write, you’ll likely end up with a fairly unhelpful critique: I liked it/Hmm, it didn’t really work for me.
Avid readers know when something works, but they don’t tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the technique behind good writing: character arcs, if/then cycles, opposing characteristics. And why should they?
Finding Writers To Connect With
Writer Unboxed – This blog has spawned a friendly and passionate writers’ group at their Facebook site. Most of the writers are novelists but many write short stories too. Join the conversation, make some writer friends and see where it takes you.
Meetup.com – I found a fabulous writers’ group in my area through Meetup. Check the listings and see what other people say about the group. In my experience a great facilitator makes all the difference, so see if you can send a private message to some members to see what they think of the group’s leadership and make-up. Also, try to find a group where at least some writers are fans of the genres you write in.
Backspace – A serious writing organization for serious writers. There’s a subscription fee to join the group, which tends to weed out the dilettantes. I’m not a member but several people I respect have raved to me about the forums.
StoryADay.org — leave a comment here on this article saying what you write and that you’d like to form a critique group. If there’s enough interest I’ll set something up in our very own forums and get things rolling.
This post is part of the Becoming A Better Writer series. Find the other parts here or buy the ebookand help support StoryADay May:
Supreme Court Justice and life-long overachiever, Sonia Sotomayor was a C-student until she decided she wanted to do better. Disregarding questions of talent and opportunity and what was expected of her, she simply went to the top kid in her fifth grade class how she got all those gold stars. And then Sotomayor listened as the girl taught her how she took notes, studied and used tricks to trigger her memory. From then on, Sotomayor was a straight-A student.
Until she reached Princeton and a professor gave her a C.
Once again, she asked for help, listened to the answer and then (and this is crucial) took action to correct her defects. She spent her summer at a bookstore, teaching herself remedial grammar. Each year she faced a different challenge and worked with her professors to overcome them[1. This story comes from a couple of interview with Justice Sotomayor by NPR’s Nina Totenburg. You can find them here and here].
And now she’s a justice in the highest court in the US, where telling a compelling story and choosing the right words are perhaps more important than in any other job but that of a writer.
Believe That You Can Improve
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking writing can’t be taught. Of course it can.
Every time you read a great book you’re learning how to write. Every time some great author talks about writing, you pick up a thing or two.
True, Sonia Sotomayor was not striving to write great literature, but she was willing to learn from people who knew more than she did. We must be willing to do the same.
Examining Your Writing Will Not Scare Away Your Muse
We’ve all experienced that magical moment when everything is flowing and it seems like the words are coming to us from some mystical well. We can start to believe that if we look too closely at what’s going on we’ll blow the whole thing.
But if you’re to make any progress, you must discover and internalize a simple truth that makes all the difference between the ‘wannabe’ writer and the seriously satisfied writer:
You must be willing to believe that writing can be taught.
And when I say ‘taught’ I simply mean that more experienced writers than yourself can share tips and techniques that help you find the fastest path from ‘beginner’ to ‘accomplished’.
Even more importantly, you must believe that you can absorb these lessons and put them into practice.
Sonia Sotomayor (no matter what you think of her judicial views on any subject) demonstrated an attitude and a pattern of behavior we should be racing to copy. If you’re not writing brilliantly now, figure out what you’re doing wrong and what you need to do to change it. Then work on making those changes.
This post is part of the Becoming A Better Writer series. Find the other parts here or buy the ebookand help support StoryADay May:
Every writer with any measure of skill will, at some point, worry that their writing isn’t good enough
Happily, you can find any number of articles and books telling us why you shouldn’t worry about it, how to break through the blocks it causes, how to ignore other people’s subjective opinions, and how to deal with rejection.
But what if your writing really isn’t good enough?
What if your stories are always being rejected?
What if your critique partners always have tons of notes for you, or worse, nothing but a blank stare?
It may mean your writing really isn’t good enough and you need to do two things:
– Work on your skills and become a better writer
– Adjust your expectations[1. You’ll notice I don’t offer ‘give up’ as a choice. You can’t. You’re a writer. You might as well accept that and drop the fantasy that you can quit whenever you want to. You can’t, so instead, work at it and set your expectations appropriately]
Stay tuned for the next few days for a StoryADay.org series on What To Do If Your Writing Just Isn’t Good Enough. In this series I’ll show you how to harness the same tools that took a poor girl from Brooklyn to the highest court in the US, how to learn like a Renaissance master, and how to feel great about your writing again.
This post is part of the Becoming A Better Writer series. Find the other parts here:
Last week we talked about the importance of writing even when you don’t feel like it. Well, enough theory. This week I bring you seven practical strategies for making it happen.
Goals, rewards and accountability buddies form part of the big picture in this scheme. They are sensible parts of your writing’s career plan. But as for the actual “starting writing” part? That’s when you need to be a bit more tricksy.
Try some of these tricks to shake loose the “sensible”, lose the “logical” and get your brain into that devil-may-care creative zone you need for writing.
1. Give Yourself Enough Time
I’ve always loved a deadline — as long as it came with a sleepless night between the two of us. But sit down to write knowing I have to have something completed in an hour?! That’s enough to induce a mammoth case of writer’s block (aka panic). Comedian John Cleese talks about this in this fabulous video on creativity (it’s long, but worth watching). He recommends no less than 90 minutes as a window for creative work, asserting that your brain will try to sabotage you for at least the first half hour…It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it does point out the necessity of allowing more time than you might otherwise plan, for creative ventures.
2. Letter To a Friend
If you’re really having trouble knowing how to get into your story, put all thoughts of readers, editors and publishing out of your head. Instead start writing a letter to your best friend, explaining what this story is going to be about. Write it as if you were describing something that had really happened. You don’t need to finish the letter (or mail it) because the act of writing it out will help you find a way into the actual story, and start writing.
3. Switch Up Your Writing Method
If you usually write on a computer, try turning on the microphone and dictating your story instead (you can transcribe it later). If you usually dictate stories, grab a good pen and some nice paper and write a few paragraphs. If you habitually write on paper, pull up a keyboard. Just the act of writing in a different physical way forces your brain to fire in different ways. You may find yourself “writing” in a different style than usual, or you may simply jump start your writing day. (This will feel awkward. That’s kind of the point. Try it.)
4. Stand Up
Sitting down is not a natural attitude, in evolutionary terms. Humans are made to be upright, to be walking around. So stand up for a while. Pace the floor, muttering like a mad person about the plot point that has you foxed. If you can swing it, put a plank across the arms of a treadmill and balance your laptop on it (I recommend walking very, very slowly until you get the hang of this). Either way, regular movement-breaks help you write by getting your blood pumping and letting your mind wander. Creativity requires thinking-time as well as working-time.
5. Write Nonsense
Some days getting started feels like torture. It feels like a physical impossibility. Put your pen on the paper, put your fingers on the keyboard and just talk. Talk about anything. How hard this is, how much you hate it, what sounds you are hearing outside your window, the feeling of your hair sticking to your neck in the summer heat, anything. Eventually you will relax (and get sick of the navel-gazing, self-absorbed, pity-kitty you have become and start writing the damned story).
6. Outline one scene
Every story has scenes. The bit where we walk in to the characters’ lives. The bit where they are forced to make a decision. The bit when they have a big fight. Take one scene and outline it. Promise yourself that you’ll write this one scene today even if you don’t manage anything else. Figure out who is in the scene, where it takes place, what the characters want, why they can’t have it (yet) and what function the scene plays in the overall scheme of the story (is it a set-up scene? Does it contain the inciting incident? Is it the climax?). Don’t worry about how you’ll write the rest of the story. Outline this one scene. Then write it.
7. Visualize Success
This is the most hippy, nebulous piece of advice I will give and its a bit more ’big picture’ than the other techniques here, but used in conjunction with them it can be extremely powerful. We are a product of our beliefs about ourselves, so let’s make sure we spend some time on the positive ones. Yes, writing is hard. No, we’re not big successes yet. So why do we do this to ourselves? What do we want? Answer this question then spend some time imagining how it will feel when you get there. Use those anticipated good feelings to propel you towards your goal.
Your goal might be as grand as seeing yourself doing book signings and readers to adoring fans. Or it might be as simple as remembering the thrill you always feel when you finish a piece.
And remember, you’re a writer. It is your job to imagine things all the time. If MBA candidates and captains of industry can use this technique, how much more successful will you, a writer, be?
—
What techniques do you use to jump start your work on a day when you don’t feel like writing?
As we sit here, there are only seven days left in May. Seven more stories and then you’re free to take a break, keep writing, set your stories on fire or, preferably revise them into works of genius. To help you out with that latter option I’ve recruited Gabriela Pereira from DIYMFA.com to give you some tips on revision.
OK, I’ll admit it. When I was in high school (and college and art school and grad school) I was definitely guilty of turning in work before revising it. Sure, I would do a quick spell-check and maybe give it a once-over for grammar, but rarely did I ever roll up my sleeves and do serious revision. And I totally know why I was so resistant to revision for so long: revision is flippin’ scary. The goal for this post is to make revision a little less scary. Let’s get started!
Principles of Revision Before we dive into the how-to part of this post, here are a few things to keep in mind as you revise your work.
1) Let your writing cool down before you revise. Revision allows you to add rational choices and strategy to the frantic bursts of creativity that came out in the first draft. Take at least two weeks (maybe longer) after writing your draft to let it cool down before you revise. Step away and work on something else, then come back to it when you’re able to look at it with an objective eye. The beauty of StoryADay is that by the time you get to Day 31 of the challenge, the story you wrote on Day 1 is probably cooled off enough that you can go back and revise.
2) You need to finish first. Nothing you write is etched in stone… you can always come back and make it better later on. You can do fix just about any problem in revision, but you can’t revise a blank page. Finish first. This is why StoryADay is such an awesome challenge: it forces you to finish. Once you’re done with the challenge, you’ll have 31 finished pieces that you can pick and choose from when you start to revise.
3) Do a first read-through. Try to create a relaxing reading experience, similar to how you would read for pleasure. Make sure you’re not focused on the fact that you’re reading your own work. Make minimal notes. Your goal is to absorb the story as a whole, not nitpick over minor details. Tip: I put my drafts into Kindle format and read it on the kindle. This makes it feel like I’m reading a “real book” and not just a printed out draft. With the Kindle, I use the footnote function to make my notes, and since I’m lazy about typing notes with my thumbs, this forces me to keep the notes short.
4) Extract an outline. Write an outline of what you’ve got as a way of getting a handle on what you have written. Then adjust the outline according to the notes you made in your read-through and implement those changes in the draft.
Revise in Layers I like to think of revision as climbing up a mountain. As you go up the mountain, you focus on the challenges and struggles of that one section. You don’t think about climbing the whole mountain at once (or else you’ll psych yourself out) but instead, only worry about that one small slice of the mountain. Revision is the same way. You start at the base of the mountain, revising the most basic elements of your story, then work your way up until you’re focusing on the nitty-gritty details like word choice and grammar. In my mind, revision looks a little bit like this:
The advantage of approaching the revision process in layers is twofold. First, you avoid overwhelming yourself because you’re only focusing on one layer at a time. Second, if you’re working with a deadline and you don’t have time to address each layer, this method can be especially valuable. If you start at the bottom and work your way up, at the very least you’ll have covered the most important elements of the story whereas if you focus on line edits first, you won’t have time to work out those bigger problems. Here’s a quick summary of each section of the revision mountain and how to address it.
Narration: This is where you consider how you’re telling the story. Is the point of view (POV) right for your story? Should it be in past tense rather than present? Is the voice of the narrator working? The best way to figure that out is to take the first page of your story and rewrite it according to the different options you’re considering, then decide which you like best.
Character Development: Don’t try to juggle all your characters at once. Start with the protagonist and figure out his/her arc, then look at key members of the supporting cast (like the villain or other important supporting characters). Work on each character separately to keep things manageable.
Plot: Here’s where extracting an outline can be extremely useful. If the typical list-format doesn’t work for you, there are many other outline options out there so you’re bound to find something that works for you.
World Building, Dialogue Description and Theme: Focus on these elements one at a time. Is the setting for your story clear? Does it feel real to the reader? How about dialogue and description? Do they flow and ring true? Finally, what’s your theme and does your story convey it?
Take-Home Message
Ultimately, revision is where you add the strategic elements to your story. Now that you know who the characters are and what’s going to happen, you can plant foreshadowing moments and hint at themes that will be important later on. You can’t do all this in your first draft because during that stage of the process you don’t know your characters or the story completely. It’s only once you know the ending and who your characters are at their core that you can manipulate the story in a strategic way.
Once you’ve revised your story, you’re ready to think about submitting it. For details on the submission process, you can look at this handy guide on How to Submit to Literary Magazines over at the DIY MFA website. And don’t forget to join in on the Sub2Pub challenge! Write on!
Gabriela Pereira is the Founder and Instigator at DIY MFA: the Do-It-Yourself Program in Creative Writing. DIY MFA is dedicated to helping writers improve their technique and build the benefits of a traditional MFA into their everyday writing lives.
Gabriela has an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School with a concentration in Writing for Children. She works as a freelance writing teacher and has taught workshops throughout New York City. Her fiction has appeared in various literary magazines and one of her lesson plans was included in the anthology DON’T FORGET TO WRITE, published by 826 National. She writes regular columns on writing for the STORIES FOR CHILDREN newsletter and CURIOSITY QUILLS PRESS.
Visit DIYMFA.com for more information or connect with Gabriela on twitter (@DIYMFA), Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. For weekly writing boosts, signup for the newsletter WRITER FUEL and stay in the loop with all the latest at DIY MFA.
“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.”
…but for the average working/studying/parenting/pulled-in-fifteen-directions aspiring writer, who will inspire us? Who will teach us our trade? Who will be our mentors?
If you were a Renaissance artist your mentor would be your master. He would teach you your craft and employ you until you, too, were a master.
If you were Stephen Sondheim you would have Oscar Hammerstein for a neighbor and he’d take an interest in you, and you’d have your mentor.
If you were in an MFA program, you’d be paying handsomely for access to a working writer who would mentor you.
But the average working/studying/parenting/pulled-in-fifteen-directions aspiring writer, doesn’t have time to talk to her best friend never mind find and domesticate a wild working writer.
So who will inspire us? Who will teach us our trade? Who will be our mentors?
The only possible answer is to look to a book.
It’s all there. Every writer you’ve ever admired has shown you what they do, in every work they write.
“When a writer writes anything about anything at all, he gives himself away and what he has to say comes out.” – Oscar Hammerstein II
Gather up their stories. Read them. Re-read them. Blog about why you loved them (or why you didn’t). Write down story sparks inspired by their works (what if you had a heroine like that? Would she have chosen him? What if you set a story in a record shop? What if your idea of a happy ending involves the bad guy getting away with it?).
The Good, The Bad And The “I Could SO Do That”
Read stories by writers you worship. Read stories by writers you think are pretty good. Read stories by writers you know you could do better than.
Make a list and think of these writers as your own, personal mentors. On a day when you’re struggling to put pen to paper, read one of those bottom-tier authors and fire yourself up with rage that they are producing more work than you! Or look to the top tier to remind you of what excites you, as a reader.
Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It
In this last few weeks before StoryADay May begins, read. Read! READ!
Further Reading
If you’re not already read short stories try these as a few places to start:
After reading the first few lines of “The Door” by E. B. White [1. found in Fifty Great Short Stories, Milton Crane (Ed.)] my immediate feeling was one of outrage: here I am reading a story by the author of a book that has generations of writers in terror of writing something the ‘wrong’ way (The Elements of Style by Strunk & White), and it’s all over the place! White is breaking his own rules with flagrant , jaw-dropping abandon!
Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid, or they were duroid (sani) or flexan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn’t quite rubber and you didn’t quite touch it but almost.
OK, so there aren’t actually many disregarded rules there, apart from possibly some missing quotation marks – but still! What an odd and unbalancing opening that is.
And I loved it. Because the words are doing exactly what the writer intends to convey: they are confusing and disjointed and all out of kilter. They are slightly beyond comprehension. Just likethat we are in the same emotional space as the main character.
You couldn’t do this without a good command of the norms of writing, so perhaps E. B. White is exactly the right person to be writing this story!
Why The Story Works
This was a trying story on a first reading. I was never really sure what was going on, although I have my own ideas. It was like reading a stream-of-consciousness Beat poem.
But it hung together. It worked even though little in the story is explicit.
Some reasons it worked:
It was visceral. The writer takes us right inside the head of someone who is disorientated and out of step with the world. He keeps us off-kilter with his language. We are never explicitly told what is up with the main character (they way we may not know what’s up with ourselves when we are ‘out of sorts’). We do, however, feel what the character is feeling, through this helter-skelter narrative.
We are inside his head, though it is not all first-person. The story switches point of view without fanfare, so sometimes we are in first person and sometimes not (“Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the name of things”).
The author sets up a metaphor at the beginning, that of rats in a scientific experiment, “…trained to jump at a square card with the circle in the middle of it…”. It is a clear and coherent part of the story. He then takes this metaphor and alludes to it throughout the story, using the phrase ‘the one with the circle on it’ in various places to let us know he’s talking about frustrated expectations or unexpected changes — about life changing the rules, just when we’ve got the hang of them — whether or not we know what’s going on in the particular moment (and on a second reading, these moments become more clear).
The story (and the protagonist) travel somewhere. At the end, I’m still not exactly sure what is going on, but I know more than I did at the beginning. The protagonist is moving on.
The ending has a finality to it, a sense of actually being an ending. The author ties everything up in a bow by bringing back some metaphors from earlier in the story, the way a modern stand up comics will bring us back around to a joke from the start of their routine, before taking their bow.
This was an oddly satisfying story.
I think it is made more difficult by reading it at a time (and as part of a culture) very different from the the one in which it was written. Life was changing for the protagonist in ways that reflected the times. Now, 70+ years later, it’s hard to catch all the cultural allusions (without studying more deeply).
The style feels very modern (or possibly “Modern”) in its form and ambition. In fact, I was stunned to find it was originally published in 1939. I think it would still prove a bit too avant garde for many readers.
But it was anything but boring.
Writer’s Tips
If you are uninspired by a story that you are writing, maybe it’s because you are sticking too closely to the rules, to a formula.
Try taking a leaf out of E. B. White’s book and mess with your readers a bit.
Try a different style.
Say less — or more.
Drop the dialogue attributions.
Throw out the quotation marks.
Write run-on sentences — or write in fragments.
Tell the story out of order.
Try to make your language sound less like you and more like the inside of your character’s head. Let the words race, if your character is running; or make them lugubrious if she is weary.
Allow yourself to take some chances.
After all, words are just squiggles on a page, and even the most experimental squiggles can be erased and re-written.
This week’s story is “Live From The Continuing Explosion”, taken from Perfect Circles, a collection of previously-published short stories by Simon Kewin. (Full disclosure, Simon is a former StoryADay participant and co-founder of Write1Sub1, a year long writing and publishing challenge that I highly recommend you check out. The new collection is available on Kindle and, at the time of publication, is priced $0.00!)
Live from the Continuing Explosion is a Big Ideas story.
When I was writing about Dorothy Parker’s “The Standard of Living“, I spent some time talking about how short stories are fabulous for taking a tiny moment and using it to create characters and events that stay with the reader, regardless of scale.
This week’s story, Simon Kewin’s “Live From The Continuing Explosion” is, by contrast, a Big Ideas story. Yes, it starts with – and stays with – a moment in time, but the moment contains a huge, earth-shattering event that shapes not just the lives of the participants but grips the whole world in its fall-out.
I’m reluctant to say too much because this story unfolds gradually, but at its heart is a terrorist event and its effects on one person and on the world.
Kewin manages to share his big ideas while creating characters that grow more and more real throughout the story. He uses the event to talk about ideas as personal as the relationship between twins and as vast as philosophy, global politics and the nature of mankind.
The Dangerous World Of The Big Idea
This story, if categorized at all, would fall into the ‘sci-fi’ bracket. One of the attractions of sci-fi is its ability to deal with big ideas, even more than the appeal of technology, spaceships or characters in tight-fitting jumpsuits (only one of those three sci-fi staples appears in this story, and it’s not the jumpsuits!).
The danger of the big idea, however, is that it can hijack the story – that the author’s voice leans over your shoulder and lectures like a pompous professor. It’s hard to insert thoughts about gods and politics into a story without jumping up on a soapbox.
One of the ways “Live From The Continuing Explosion” deals with this danger is by giving various characters a virtual soapbox as part of the story. Right at the end, for example, one character makes a speech about “what has been learned”. It doesn’t jar, however, because it is an actual speech, in front of a crowd. As reader, you’ve come along on the journey with that character as she moves from by-stander to reluctant figure-head, and you have a lot of sympathy for her. A lot of the action before the end is sketched out, implied, and I was happy to have the character tie everything together at the conclusion. Plus, that’s not the end of the story…
Beyond The Big Idea
If this story dodges the danger of using big ideas it is because the author spends time building up the characters, even the minor ones. He concentrates at times on descriptive writing so that the reader can *see* the set-pieces and isn’t just being lectured to. He does that with vivid descriptions – not of the height and weight of his characters, by how they move, what they look at.
The two children run, screaming with delight. Around the legs of the adults in the crowd, legs like planted trees. They run in easy harmony as they veer left or right, speeding up or slowing down together without needing to watch each other. They laugh so much they can barely breathe. They hold hands, letting go only at the last moment as they split off to go around someone before reuniting.
A dog, watching them, barks excitedly, wanting to join in.
They run as if they have practised the whole set of manoeuvres beforehand. They run almost as one, a single being with two halves.
It’s a lovely, vivid moment and — given what follows — a really great opening to the story.
Staring Down A Cliche
It’s hard to describe the world in terms readers understand without stumbling into cliches. Of course it is. Cliches become cliches because they are good desciptions that we identify with.
Kewin deals with one of these in a way I really liked: he jumps on the cliche and expands it until it is no longer a cliche but an image that is all his own. He uses words that work exquisitely well to do this. When talking about an explosion Kewin takes the cliche “the blossom” of an explosion and expands it:
… vast, obscene flower billowing forth at demonic speed, black stigma deep inside red and yellow petals.
(By the way, use of ‘stigma’? In this context? Love it!)
He also takes the the idea of someone being inside a bubble and ‘owns’ it: making it the universal name for a phenomenon, not just a literary device. People all over the world begin calling the phenomenon ‘The Bubble’, as naturally as if someone had officially named it.
Short Story or Novel?
The other danger of the big idea is that you must devote so much space in your story to the ideas that the action and character development happen too quickly and the reader is left wishing the story had been a novel instead.
I think this story suffered a touch from this — which is not the worst thing anyone could say about a story 😉
Writer’s Lessons
If you can’t see a way around using a familiar image, try using one of Kewin’s techniques: expand the cliche with a clever twist, or weave it through the story so that it becomes natural.
If you ever feel that you have no ideas that are big enough to merit writing down, remember this. For the short story, tiny truths are even often just as valid, if not more, than big ideas.
Have you written stories with Big Ideas behind them? Are they easier/harder to write? Do you feel they worked as well as stories based on smaller moments?
When you write, if it is to be any good at all, you must feel free, free and not anxious.
-Brenda Ueland “If You Want To Write”
Some of my best writing, before I started to concentrate on my fiction again, was done in hand-written letters to my childhood friend, Linda.
She is witty and clever and very different from me in many ways, but we share a long history, and she understands all my references. She is unfailingly supportive, except when I’m being an idiot and need a kick up the rear, which she will happily – and gently – administer.
Writing letters to my friend is effortless because I want to entertain her, I know her, and I know she will be a generous reader.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could be sure that all your stories were met with such an audience?
Well, of course, you can’t. But the best way to assure a good response to your writing is to write your very best stuff. And the only way to write your very best stuff, is to come at it with confidence, as if it were going to be read by your ideal reader.
Do you know who your ideal reader is? (Hint: it might be you).
Sketch out a few characteristics of you Ideal Reader now.
Do you actually know someone who would be your ideal reader?
What authors does she like?
How does he like his characters to act?
Now, keep this image of your ideal reader in mind next time you sit down to write a story.
If this technique helps you, leave a comment and the description of your ideal reader, below. I’d love to see what you came up with.
Writing and crafting a good story is hard work. But there is joy in it too. Otherwise what would be the point?
I was reminded of this when quoting one of my favourite lines from the movie, The Princess Bride.
The heroes are off to take on bad guys. The odds are against them and they have a hard, painful and probably futile fight ahead of them. Neverless Miracle Max and his wife Valerie wave them off cheerfully, crying,
“Bye, boys! Have fun storming the castle!”
Writing a story is a lot like storming a castle and there is a lot we writers could learn from Wesley, Inigo, Fezzik, Buttercup and yes, even Vizzini, as we storm the gates of our stories.
Have a good reason to storm the castle
Castles are strong. They were built specifically to withstand a good storming, employing all kinds of tricks to repel attackers. You had to have a damned good reason to want to storm a castle. As we know, Wesley had the most important reason to storm his castle (‘true love’). No lesser cause would have compelled him to overcome the difficulties of overpowering enemy manpower, a locked gate with only one key, and having been mostly dead all day.
You need a good reason to write. Even if you lose faith at times, at one point you believed enough in this story, this character or the lesson you felt you could share, to begin the audacious process of breaking through fear, apathy and laziness and begin writing this story. Hold fast to that reason. Your story is worth fighting for.
Formulate A Plan
It may not seem like the heroes have much going for them, but they take stock of their resources (“If only we had a wheelbarrow”), examine their strengths (“your brains, Fezzik’s strength, my steel”), and come up with a plan, long before they take their first step towards the castle gate.
Don’t assume that, just because you like to write, you can sit down and create a whole story without doing any planning. You don’t have to know what will happen at every step of your plan but you need something to build on. Every story needs a hero, a setting, and some movement (something must happen or change between the beginning and the end). Do you know what must change for your character? (even if you don’t know *how* it will change).
You don’t even have to form a plan before you begin writing (the heroes have left to storm the castle before Wesley even wakes up, never mind begins to form his plan), but perhaps, like Wesley and his friends, you should pause at the edge of the woods to take stock, and plan the next stage of your battle every so often.
Be Flexible
WESLEY: Now, there may be problems once we’re inside.
INIGO: I’ll say. How do I find the Count? Once I do, how do I find you again? Once I find you again how do we escape?”
FEZZIK: Don’t pester him. He’s had a hard day.
Just because I’m saying you should plan a little, doesn’t mean you need to be rigid. Once you have stormed the gates of your story (the beginning), you still have to find your enemy, rescue the princess and find a way out. You do not need to know how all these things happen before you start to write. You may find that circumstances within your story take you in unexpected directions. You will need to be flexible. But bend too far and your story can break.
To avoid this that each of your characters, and you as the writer, stay true to your goals.
Stay True To Your Goal
When Count Rugen is at the point of Inigo’s sword, he offers Inigo money, power, all that he has and more, anything he asks for. It’s a pretty tempting offer for a drunk with no prospects (“there is not a lot of money in revenge”). Inigo, however, does not hesitate. He knows exactly what he wants, and that is: to avenge his father.
As you are writing, your story and your characters will offer you little side trips, new characters may pop up and tempt you with their fascinating foibles, new elements may demand to be included. Take some advice from Vizzini (“When a job goes wrong, you go back to the beginning”). Take a breath and ask yourself what was your goal for this story?
However much it loves being endlessly written, this story’s fate (like Count Rugen’s) is to be finished off. Stay focused on the main idea, the main theme, the main direction of the action, and ignore all its false promises of goodies if you just keep writing it, if you let it live, forever. You know, as well as Inigo, that the only way to satisfaction is to stick with your goal until the end.
Trust That An Ending Will Present Itself If You Keep Moving Towards It
At the climax of The Princess Bride, things are in a bit of a mess for our heroes. Sure, they have successfully stormed the castle and Inigo has his revenge, but it seems that Buttercup has married the evil prince after all, Fezzik has disappeared and Inigo can’t find Wesley. Buttercup is about to kill herself, Wesley cannot move and is at the point of Prince Humperdink’s sword in a tower room with no apparent exit.
Does Wesley give up? No, he does not. Instead, he vamps.
That’s right, he keeps talking, until something changes, until he finds the strength to take action. And when that moment comes, everything changes for the better: Humperdink surrenders, Inigo reappears and Fezzik turns up with the perfect means of escape.
The “all-is-lost” point is a classic narrative technique. Unfortunately it tends to hit us writers hard, too. The only piece of advice I have ever heard about how to get out of the pit of despair while writing a story, is to keep writing. It’s about as appetizing as that Miracle Pill cooked up by Miracle Max, and ultimately just as effective.
Even if you stumble, like Wesley, or end up editing out some of what you write, keep moving and a solution will spring from your characters, your situation or both. Trust me on this. Just keep writing and an ending will appear. If you start to question this advice, remind yourself of what Buttercup says to Wesley when he first reappears in her life:
“I will never doubt again.”
There are so many wonderful moments in this movie that I’m sure I could have kept writing on this theme all day. What writing lessons would you draw from the characters and scenes in The Princess Bride? Please do share your Princess Bride writing tips in the comments 🙂
I’m excited to announce our very first free, live teleseminar coming up this Friday.
StoryADay May is all about a creative splurge: massive amounts of writing, experimentation and fun. With any luck we all came out with a handful of stories that surprised us: they were really quite good and maybe there were some that we think we could share with readers. But maybe not quite yet.
Is Your Short Story Publication-Ready?
Editing your writing is hard, but it makes all the difference between a first draft and a publishable story.
On Friday, Sept 9, 2011, at 1:30 PM (EST) come and learn about the different levels and stages of editing.
In this teleseminar you’ll learn about:
Understanding the different levels of editing and how to use this knowledge to keep from being discouraged,
How to figure out what you need right now,
Do It Yourself editing,
How to effectively get editing help from others.
You’ll also receive an exclusive money-saving offer on my upcoming series of writing seminars aimed specifically at short-story writers.
What It Is
A seminar that you can use your home phone (or cell phone or Skype) to call in to.
I’ll talk for about 20 minutes and take questions at the end. I’ll answer as many as I can. (I’ll mute your phones before I start, so don’t worry about barking dogs or crying babies in the background!)
If you can’t be on the call, live, send your questions to me by email before the call (julie@storyaday.org) and you can download the whole thing after the event (I’ll send out an email to this list with the details, on Friday afternoon).
What It Is Not
There is no fee for this teleseminar (although there may be telephone charges, depending on where you live and what kind of plan you have).
This is a look at how to approach editing and revising your stories. It is NOT a primer on grammar or spelling or where to put your apostrophes. For one thing, I’ve noticed that most of the writers at StoryADay seem to know how to do that stuff – although we all occasionally make slips that must be caught in editing. For another thing, there is a metric ton of information online about how to use grammar. (I suggest you start here.)
How To Join In
Sign up for the StoryADay Creativity Lab to receive all the details including a call-in number and conference code, and more information about that discount on upcoming seminars
If you’ve ever wondered how best to revise your work, join us this Friday, Sept 9 at 1:30 PM (EST) for the StoryADay Creativity Lab Editing & Revision Teleseminar
P.S. Don’t forget, at the end of the call you’ll receive a discount code for 25% off future seminars.
This seminar won’t be a grammar lesson because I’ve noticed that most of the writers around here are, well, pretty good writers. But, in case you need a little help, or have that one rule that always trips you up, here are some great grammar and style resources for you:
Mignon Fogarty is possibly the most famous grammarian around these days and this page is a great start for those little grammar niggles that plague you.
This is a fun grammar and words podcast from Minnesota Public Radio. It’s short (6-8 minutes) and entertaining. Just the thing for a quick drive or during your morning shower!
If you write for magazines or newspapers in the US, this is the style guide they probably use. The site requires a subscription but it is exhaustive — and you can get a free trial.
A great resource from Purdue University. Lots of good stuff in here.
But for all this, the absolute best thing you can do to improve your grammar is read lots and lots of really well-written books: immerse yourself in awesome grammar. (I recommend Dickens, P. G. Wodehouse, Norton Juster, John Steinbeck, Stephen King, A.S. Byatt, oh and many, many others).
You cannot immerse yourself in wonderful writing and come away worse off. You cannot read perfect grammar and not absorb it.
So, I repeat the best advice ever give to any writer: read, read, read!
I posted a casual question to my Twitter network about whether or not I should struggle on, reading a book I wasn’t enjoying.
The answers turned out to be a valuable lesson for anyone writing a book.
Reading between the lines, I saw that most people have a set of definite and personal rules about what it takes for them to keep reading — whether they realize it or not.
The responses seemed neatly divided between those who struggle on at all costs and those who gaily cast the book over their shoulder and waltz off with a new one, with nary a second glance.
1. Is The Writing Good?
As you’ve probably guessed, I considered myself firmly in the first camp for years and years (probably a product of a British upbringing, where it is understood that certain literary works are ‘worthy’ and ‘must’ be read, even if you hate them).
But now? With so many books and so little time? Why soldier on?
Well, if the writing is exquisite, if it moves something inside me, I’ll keep picking up the book even if I hate the characters or think the plot is dull. I might never make it to the end, but I’ll continue to feel like I ought to make the effort.
Books in this category for me include:
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which was worth sticking with and opened up a whole world of ‘magical realism’ books to me.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke . This took me well over a year to read because the language was so dense that I had to keep putting it down and coming up for air. But I kept going back to it and consider it totally worth the investment.
If the writing isn’t amazing, then reading this book isn’t even improving my own writing, so why am I reading it?
2. Are the characters compelling?
I read a terrible Harlequin romance recently. In fact, I say ‘terrible’, but it obviously wasn’t because I stayed up into the wee hours just to finish it. The plot was predictable, the language made me cringe — often — but the characters…something about the characters made me keep turning the pages just to find out how they ended up together. (Oh, and there were racy bits that were fun). The pacing was good and the writer part of me was fascinated by how this writer was keeping me hook even though I shouldn’t have been.
If I care about the characters and the language is at least readable, I’ll stick with pretty much any book.
I gave up on “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith because her characters, though finely drawn, had nothing for me. I’m struggling with Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” because, even though I can see that it’s “important” I dislike every character – including the omniscient narrator. I’m giving up on a mystery novel because the characters all sound alike, except when the author is using them as a punchline.
3. Am I Learning Anything?
Even if I’m not loving the characters or the plot, I might keep reading if the setting is well realized. If the author has really done their research and is painting a gripping picture of life on a Martian colony or how to build a medieval cathedral (or an elevator to space), or what it would be like to grow up in Venice, I’ll probably keep reading.
That mystery novel I just shelved? It’s supposed to be set in England but the author writes like an Anglophile who has learned about Britain from Agatha Christie novels (Tips for Anglophiles: no-one has stopped for afternoon tea since the 1930s, though they might stop for a tea break consisting of a cuppa and a nice choccie biccie. No English policeman would make an internal comment about being ‘blue collar’, but he’d probably be proud of his working class roots. People in Britain don’t talk about their car’s speed in kph, even if we are supposed to be metric.)
A good setting can be spellbinding. A poorly researched or written one will get you shelved.
4. Am I pressed for time?
There are a lot of books out there and, in the midst of every day life, I’m going to get resentful pretty quickly if I think the author’s wasting my time.
If, however, I’m on holiday in a cabin in the woods with no-one asking me for anything, I’ll be much more forgiving. I’ll wait for the author to get to the point. I’ll struggle on to find out what happens, even if the author doesn’t seem in a hurry to get to the climax.
On the average day, though? Many people subscribe to this philosophy.
As a writer who wants to be read, you need to revise and revise until your language is the best it can be, your characters utterly compelling and your setting is spellbinding.
EDITING AND REVISION SEMINAR
Editing your writing is hard, but it’s one of the things that makes the difference between a first draft and a published draft.
On Sept 9, come and learn about the different levels and stages of editing with StoryADay.org’s own Julie Duffy.
In this teleseminar you’ll learn about:
Understanding the different levels of editing and how to use this knowledge to keep from being discouraged,
How to figure out what you need right now,
DIY editing,
How to effectively get editing help from others.
You’ll also receive an exclusive money-saving offer on my upcoming series of writing seminars aimed specifically at short-story writers.
Sign up for the Creativity Lab to hear more about the free editing seminar. (The Creativity Lab is different from the StoryADay Advance List, which is only about the challenge. The Creativity Lab is an infrequent newsletter, chock-full of tools and information to help you in your writing life).
Today’s guest post from Melissa Dinwiddie is a wonderful primer on how to use the StoryADay community to help you become more productive than you ever dreamed. Thanks, Melissa!
Do you know one of the most effective things you can do to get your writing done?
Make yourself accountable.
I don’t know the statistics, but it’s a well known fact that if you want to reach a goal, speaking your commitment — including your deadline — to someone you know will hold you to it makes you dramatically more likely to actually do it.
Accountability is a powerful tool, and there are a number of ways you can integrate it into your writing practice. One of my own secret weapons is an accountability buddy.
Here’s what I’ve learned about maintaining an effective accountability partnership.
At the start of the year I was in a mastermind group (another great accountability tool), assembled with the express purpose of helping each other accomplish one specific goal in the month of January. When that group dissolved, a couple of us decided to keep checking in with each other.
At first our monthly calls started to get a little chatty — understandable enough, since we liked each other and had come to think of each other as friends.
This is an inherent danger in any accountability relationship. The problem, of course, is that chatting does not make for finished projects and completed goals.
Accountability partners have to be vigilant, and must keep coming back to the purpose for their partnership. If you want to chat, set up another date specifically for that. During your accountability check-ins, stick with the agenda: keeping each other on track.
This is exactly what I did at the end of a particularly chatty call. “Before we hang up,” I asked, “what’s your next step?”
My buddy confessed that she had a novel that had been sitting in a drawer for way too long, and what she really wanted was to get it edited and up for sale as a download on her site.
“Aha,” I responded, kicking into coaching mode, “so what’s stopping you?”
I asked her realistically how long she thought the editing would take, and when she said “about four hours,” I suggested (okay, I practically insisted) that she do it this week. In other words, I held out an expectation that I thought was achievable.
With my kick in the butt, she was ready to take on this project that she’d been putting off, so the next step was to set up a check-in schedule that worked for her. She committed to emailing me a progress report every night before going to bed, and set a goal of a 2-3 chapters per day.
Although it turned out four hours was an underestimation, I’m pleased to report that in less than two weeks my buddy had finished editing her entire manuscript and was ready to tackle the production side of getting her novel made into a downloadable ebook format. She swears she never would have gotten there without my help.
Do you think this kind of partnership might work for you? Give it a try! To keep you on track, I recommend sticking with the same structure every time you meet. The following questions are a good jumping off place:
What did you achieve since we last checked in? Did you accomplish your goal?
What didn’t work? What are you going to do differently next time?
What goal do you commit to between now and the next check-in?
What can you use help with?
Remember to reserve your chatting for another time, and let me know how it goes!
Artist, Writer and Inspirationalist Melissa Dinwiddie helps creatives (and “wannabe” creatives) to get unstuck, get unpoor, and just plain play bigger. Find her at her blogs, Living A Creative Life and 365 Days of Genius.
Win! Win! Win!
Leave a comment with your best tips for boosting productivity and/or working with other people and win a copy of Rory’s Story Cubes, a wonderful dice game that doubles as a story-telling tool. Roll the dice and make a story from the extremely cute images on the dice.
Today’s winner will be a random draw, so you get extra entries if you post about StoryADay on your blog, Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else (yes, I’ll give credit for blog posts from yesterday). Just leave me a comment saying where you posted.
Special thanks to Rory O’Connor and the lovely folks at Gamewright Games for donating this prize.
Recently, naturalists announced that the sloth — the animal whose name has become a synonym for laziness — is actually a lot more active than previously thought. It turns out that when we cage them and observe them, we don’t see what’s really going on in the sloth’s world.
Today I have a great guest post for you from Susan Daffron, a writer and publishing consultant. She shows us how, as writers, the times when our minds are most fertile and active, might — to an observer — look like the times when we are being, well, slothful. She shows us that productivity for writers makes its own demands, and how to succeed by embracing that.
(You can read more about Susan’s upcoming publishing conference at the end of the article).
Then, leave your comments about how you will jump-start your creativity at the end of the article and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Rory’s Story Cubes – a great creativity booster in a box!
As a writer, I’ve gone through periods of extreme productivity and extreme sloth. Although I have written 12 books, last year in 2010, I released exactly zero.
For a variety of personal and business-related reasons, I went through a creative burnout like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Writing, which had always been fairly easy for me in the past, was suddenly extremely difficult.
Climbing Out Of A Slump
I also discovered that the less I wrote, the less I wanted to write. Talk about a lack of productivity!
I spent some time looking back at what happened during my creative slump. I realized my lack of writing productivity stemmed from three issues:
1. Lack of ideas. The stressful events I experienced caused my creativity to simply shut down. To jumpstart my mind, I surfed to online writing sites (like StoryaDay.org!), used random-word and writing-prompt generators, and started talking to my husband about my various writing thoughts for outside feedback and support.
2. Lack of motivation. As noted, a bunch of things that happened last year brought me down. Creativity does not flow when you’re depressed. I decided to make a commitment to exercising and started reading more inspirational materials on creativity, writing, and life balance. (The library is full of wonderful FREE books just waiting to be read!)
3. Lack of time. You’ve read it before, but I’ll say it again: you have time to write if you make time to write. During my slump, I wasn’t working smart. Part of me already knew it, but I had to forcibly reacquaint myself with the methods I’d used in the past to carve out real productive writing time. I opted to make a commitment to write every morning and also started thinking up ideas for articles and posts the night before. “Sleeping on” a writing idea really works!
And The Winner Is…
I’m happy to report that the old adage “writers write” is true. Since I got my writing mojo back again, I have been writing regularly. I have my next book completely outlined and 19 case studies/interviews input so far. I’ll be speaking at a conference this summer and plan to release the book in time for it. (Deadlines help motivation too!)
If you’re a writer who wants to publish, you can get inspiration and learn more about the book publishing process at the Self-Publishers Online Conference. The third annual event is May 10-12, 2011 (http://www.SelfPublishersOnlineConference.com) Use the code SusanSentMe and get 10% off your registration!
Susan Daffron, aka The Book Consultant (http://www.TheBookConsultant.com) owns a book and software publishing company. She spends most of her time writing, laying out books in InDesign, or taking her five dogs out for romps in the forest. She also teaches people how to write and publish profitable client-attracting books and puts on the Self-Publishers Online conference (http://www.SelfPublishersOnlineConference.com) every May.
Win! Win! Win!
Leave a comment with your best tips for jump-starting creativity and win a copy of Rory’s Story Cubes, a wonderful dice game that doubles as a story-telling tool. Roll the dice and make a story from the extremely cute images on the dice. Brilliant for days when you’re stalled and need to regain your mojo.
Special thanks to Rory O’Connor and the lovely folks at Gamewright Games for donating this prize.
What are the consequences of trying to write a perfect story?
That you might get stuck. That you might not progress. That you might quit. Don’t quit. Write a crappy First
Very few writers really know what they’ve done until they’ve done it…the only way I can get anything done at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts
Anne Lamott, “Bird By Bird”
Photo by David Templeman
Make Lots of Mistakes Quickly =
Learn Quickly How To Avoid Those Mistakes In Future
What are the consequences of writing a bad story? That you might get discouraged?
That’s not something we embrace readily, but it’s not fatal.
Now, what are the consequences of trying to write a perfect story?
That you might get stuck.
That you might not progress.
That you might quit.
Embrace the cause of the crappy first draft, and save your writing life!
How To Create Your First Draft
1: Work Fast
This is what keeps the Inner Editor from getting his claws into you.
Write like the wind. Keep running and leave the Inner Editor behind.
Write fast, get to the point where you get stuck, and keep writing anyway.
2: Don’t Look Back
Literally, don’t look back at your draft as you’re writing. Even if you have forgotten what you named a secondary character or a town, just put in a placeholder and keep writing.
If you look back you’ll be tempted to judge, to edit, and you’ll slow down and then you’ll lose momentum, and then it’s so much harder to get going again.
3: Have Fun in the First Draft Sandbox
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
-Richard Bach
Treat your first draft as your sandbox: get your fingers dirty, build ugly models, knock them down later.
Don’t Quit. Fight The Fear. Write A Crappy First Draft Today.
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I’m not giving you a topic or a character or telling you where to set your story. I’m giving you a way into a story.
“
, 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:
– stories from the first half of the 20th Century
– more early 20th Century short fiction![[Tuesday Reading Room] The Door by E. B. White](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/EB_White_cropped.png)
, a collection of previously-published short stories by Simon Kewin. (Full disclosure, Simon is a former StoryADay participant and co-founder of 
.
![Reading[Day12]*](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/142/355369679_236316a33f.jpg)
