[Writing Prompt] Mining Your Memories

Screen Shot 2013-06-26 at 12.06.54 AMDon’t forget: at 1PM (EST) today (Wednesday) I’m hosting a webinar on how to write, revise and release a story all in one week, with DIYMFA’s Gabriela Pereira. And we have a special announcement. Register Now  

 


Last week Neil Gaiman’s new novel The Ocean At The End of the Lane came out.

I like his books. But I LOVE his online journal. So on reading the book, it was clear straight away, that he was mining his personal memories: both as an adult attending his father’s funeral (which he did in reality a few years ago, and blogged about) and as a child growing up (one county over from where I would grow up during the following decade).

I’m reading the book slowly, but so far here’s what I see: the details. The details — of what the child sees, where the adult goes — are startlingly clear and appropriate to each voice. The adult goes for a drive to avoid the funeral hooplah, and sees the world as it is and how it has changed. The child looks unflinchingly at a dead body until he is hustled away by the grown ups. But he notes, disgruntled, that the body is draped in a blanket from his own bedroom. He takes in details of the body looked unlike the person as they had been, alive. He measures money in how many four-for-a-penny Blackjacks and Fruit Salads it can buy him (the pervasive, child-accessible sweeties/candies of Mr. Gaiman’s and my childhoods!).

The Prompt

Write a story based on one strong image from your childhood — or at least a decade ago

It doesn’t need to be anything as shocking as discovering a dead body. Just take a vivid memory-image and weave a story around it. Have your characters recall details that you recall. Have them feel the way you felt.

For instance, I remember being allowed (encouraged?) to visit an elderly neighbour of ours when I was very young. I went round one day and saw, in a window above her living room window, a stranger, cleaning her windows from the inside. This person was wearing a white, sleeveless top, hair slicked back, cheeks red. I can remember that the house was attached to other houses on either side, built of brick. The windows were sash windows. The door was up a step from the long path that ran between two strips of lawn. There was a garden gate made of wood with one of those metal latches you have to lift to open it. I still remember the physical sensations I felt when I said…

I *know* this character. I know the mistake she’s about to make and her reaction to it. Now, can I put that into a story where it turns out that the person upstairs is not who Mrs McKay thinks it is? Can I have my character go on to make a similar but bigger mistake? Can I have her triumph over her personality flaws, or will she be defeated by them?

What memory will you write about?

[Writing Prompt] Perseverance

 

This is the first weekly prompt since the end of StoryADay 2013. Congrats to all those who took part. If you finished even one story you’ll know something about this week’s prompt:

The Prompt

Write a story with “Perseverance” as the theme

Tips

You can write a fast-paced romp in which your protagonist perseveres against ridiculous, comic odds,

You can write a deep and thoughtful piece that reflects on the role of perseverance in a good or bad situation

You get to decide if your hero succeeds or fails and whether or not their perseverance (or lack thereof) helped. (Tip: Don’t be afraid to do the opposite  of what readers might  expect. Perseverance might *cause* things to fall apart…)

Go!

The 7DayStory

P.S. Did you sign up to take part in the 7DayStory Challenge? It’s a challenge I’m running with Gabriela Pereira from DIYMFA.com. It takes you through the process of writing, revising and releasing a story in 7Days (a luxurious pace, around these parts!). Check it out: 7DayStory.com

 

P.P.S. If you don’t want these emails to pop into your inbox every week, but would like to be able to save them for later, why not let your email software filter them so that they drop straight into an archived folder? Here’s how to do it in Gmail.

[Writing Prompt] When One Door Closes…

This is it. We’ve come to the end of StoryADay May 2013.

Thank you so much for being a part of it. I would love to hear how you’ve got on, what you have learned. If you post on your own blog about your experience, please leave a link to it here. If you’d be willing to be interviewed (for future articles here at StoryADay.org), leave a comment here and let me know.

The Prompt

Write about an ending (and what happens next)

Tips

  • Perhaps your main character is graduating from school or college. What is she feeling? What doors will open for her? How will what he wants be affected by what he has to do?
  • People leave our lives in many ways. How will your main character fill the void when someone important leaves their life?
  • Just for fun, what if your main character is a writer, or other artist, finishing up a project? What if he/she has had a work rejected? What other doors will open for them next?

Don’t forget to come back on June 3 for the 7DayStory challenge! And keep an eye on your inbox for next week’s regular Write On Wednesday writing prompt.

Most of all, keep writing!
Julie

[Writing Prompt] The Non-Memoir

Don’t miss this news about a new week-long challenge to keep you writing in June — and this one comes with a built-in revision component!

The Prompt

Take an event/experience from your own life and fictionalize it

Last year, at a writer’s conference I was struck by the reaction of a panel of agents every time someone asked them a question that started, “I’m writing a memoir, and…”

They rolled their eyes. They groaned. They composed themselves and gently tried to dissuade the writer from getting their hopes up about being able to publish a memoir. The reasons?

  • Everyone is writing a memoir. Competition is huge and truly compelling memoirs are few and far between
  • Even if you’ve had a tragic life event, that’s not enough to sell your story. By all means write it, but don’t expect to sell it unless you have a bigger story: how you triumphed after the tragedy; how someone else can learn from your experiences; how you met/become/already were a celebrity (OK, that last one’s a bit cynical, but not far from the truth).

The best piece of advice I heard was not ‘stop writing memoir’ but “why not take your story and turn it into fiction, with compelling characters, rich scenarios, drama, comedy, all the things that make for a great novel?”

The Prompt

Take an event/experience from your own life and fictionalize it

Tips

  • Use the truth of your emotions, reactions etc., to inform the story but use this chance to have your character be wittier/smarter/weaker/more vulnerable than you were.
  • Write a better ending than the one life gave you.
  • Use an often-told family story as source material if you don’t want to write about your own experiences (e.g. the story of how my grandparents courted and eventually married is a wonderful one that I fully intend to mine for a story one day)
  • Remember that you are not cataloguing history. You are weaving a story that will share some experience in a visceral way with readers. Go deeply into the emotions and/or the details at least once during the story. Make us feel it.

[Writing Prompt] Thwarted

One of the best pieces of advice I received for writing short stories was to make your character want something. Once your character wants something you have a structure for the whole story: put obstacles in their way and see how they react.

The Prompt

Create a character who wants something really badly, then thwart them at every turn.

Tips

  • This story can be realistic, or high-fantasy; historical or far-future; tragic or comic. The strength of this prompt is that it focuses on character. No matter where you set it, you can make it realistic by having your character react to being thwarted in a way that feels familiar to your reader.
  • You get to decide whether your character gets what they want at the end or not.
  • Read Fight City (An Irish Jimmy Gallagher Novelette) by last week’s guest prompter James Scott Bell for a really fun example of how you can spin out this kind of ‘thwartage’ for a whole novella (it’s only $0.99 but you may also borrow it for free under Kindle lending plan).
  • Here’s a short-short story from Mary Robinette Kowal that demonstrates how a simple ‘want’ can sustain a whole story and help create rounded characters out of somewhat surprising source-material. (I highly recommend the Writing Excuses podcast that Mary co-presents with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells and Howard Tayler. It doesn’t often focus on the short story, but it is always inspiring and only 15 minutes long.)

 

[Writing Prompt] The Child

Write A Child’s Story

This is ‘the story of a child’, not necessarily a story for children’s story

Tips

  • Children are adventurous. They are open. They are surprisingly insightful. They see the world in bright colors, not moral greys. They are, in other words, great hero material.
  • Children are inexperienced in the world and therefore, generally, not paralyzed by potential consequences. This makes them great hero material AND great villain material (Lord Of The Flies).
  • Around the age of ten children are aware of themselves, have some empathy for others, a growing facility to play with the more sophisticated language they hear from adults, and a fairly well developed ability to survive without an adult’s help. They are developing an awareness of their own personality and its affect on others and their ability to choose what they do with that. This is why so many great child-characters are written at this pre-teen stage. Consider making your protagonist this age
  • If you don’t have much exposure to children right now, consider writing a story in flashback, where your older character tells the story of themselves as a child (as Rob Reiner did in Stand By Me).