12Writing happily presents the Bivalve Book Club for writers! This is a 10 week course running from May 12th to July 14th. Bivalve participants will read four books, respond to writing directives correlating to readings, and participate in group discussions on the books and writing directives. Join an online community of writers in growing and thinking as we journey through the works of others!
Showing posts with label creative writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creative writing. Show all posts
Friday, April 27, 2012
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Creating an Online Writing University
It isn't often that writers will admit to learning something from lawyers, but the Solo Practice University has developed an educational network for new lawyers that I would like to adopt for new writers. In this framework, writers would seek out writing instructors who share similar interests. Yet unlike the Solo Practice approach, I believe that a writing website could overcome the need for membership fees by placing the writers and instructors on equal footing...
Friday, April 23, 2010
Write the Reading Experience You've Always Wanted
Everyone, it seems, wants fame. We want success. And success, in writing, is measured by readership. It's measured by exposure to the greater public. It's measured in the connections we have to other writers and also to our publishers. Yet the root of these connections is the work itself - the writing.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Vacations and Writing: Overcoming the Upheaval of Holiday Travel
So here I am, on my second trip of the past two months (Christmas in January...that's what happens when you visit your girlfriend's family in Thailand over Christmas).
For some, the happy stress of travel actually helps inspire new writing. Watching a live cobra jump a moat and a low wall to fly into the bleachers of tourists - excitement like this can lead to some wonderful new takes on Edvard Munch's "The Scream." For example:
For some, the happy stress of travel actually helps inspire new writing. Watching a live cobra jump a moat and a low wall to fly into the bleachers of tourists - excitement like this can lead to some wonderful new takes on Edvard Munch's "The Scream." For example:
You see that third one? The entire painting has changed. There's even a second person, now, and all the details are sharply defined - clearly the work of a live cobra sneaking into the room. Somebody better call G.I. Joe before it's too late...
For others, the idea of writing while traveling is simply untenable. And the reason for this is simple: most travel isn't that exciting. Bangkok, for my girlfriend, isn't exotic - it's home. With airline tickets what they are, normally she and I drive to exciting places like Illinois or Iowa to see my family. Again, we're not talking about exotic - we're talking about home. We're talking about "how the hell am I gonna write my novel when I'm surrounded by nieces and nephews and - God Forbid - my parents??"
I'm here to reassure you that writing while visiting friends and family is indeed possible. Here are some tips and techniques for Escaping the Creative Suction of Well-Meaning People Who Love You:
1. Stay at a Hotel
Expensive? Yes. Antisocial? Depends on the size of your family. But with a refuge away from the smorgasbord of turkey and cranberry, you can take some time out to work on your story when you wake up in the mornings and before going to bed. Assuming of course you aren't married. In case of marriage, you may need to request a separate hotel room from your spouse. And trust me, this is will give you lots of good material to write about - but you won't stay married for long.
2. Bring a Laptop
If you have a computer, this adds to your credibility as a writer. Tell your friends and family that you're working on the next bestseller. Some in your family will roll their eyes and leave you alone. Others will be extremely fascinated by the idea of your novel. They'll ask you all kinds of questions about the plot, the characters, maybe even which publishing house will offer you largest advance. (Be sure to smile and be polite - there isn't a publishing house on Earth that knows the name Ryan Edel, let alone would give me an advance right now. And I even have my own website.) Some of these relatives will even remind you of the importance of sharing profits with loving and lovely family members.
This latter group of relatives is the group you most need to escape. The most certain means of flight will require a fresh box of baking soda. Clutching your laptop to your chest like a Roman shield, toss a handful of the white stuff into your mouth - the foaming will be mistaken either for rabies or cyanide. If you have a strong enough grip on your computer, you can work on your novel in the ambulance on the way to the ER. Either that, or you'll have to hope that defibrillator damage to home electronics is covered by your insurance.
3. Eat Lots of Sugar
It's a known fact that the brain does not use fat or protein for energy - neurons can only metabolize sugar. And maybe caffeine. So the more Christmas cookies you devour, the better your novel will be. Assuming, of course, the sticky bits of sweetness don't jam your keyboard. Or give you diabetes.
4. Eat a Ton of Fats and Salt
Good for maintaining a healthy weight? No. But your adrenal glands require healthy amounts of cholesterol and salt in order to function properly. Symptoms of adrenal dysfunction include depression, inexplicable anger, and an inability to deal with stress. All of these symptoms are exacerbated by the loving words of people who care more about your weight/finances/occupation than you do. So toss back some hefty helpings of adrenal gland goodness. Then wash it all down with some orange juice - the sugar helps with salt absorption, and the Vitamin C is also critical for healthy adrenal function.
5. Try Coke
Skip Coca-Cola, I'm talking about the real stuff, that white powder you snort up your nose. Powdered sugar, flour, baking soda, anthrax - pretty much any white-powder substitute will do. Some families might sit you down for an intervention, but most families won't. Instead, they'll try to pretend they didn't just see you snort a line of powdered lemon-lime Kool-Aid, and you'll be able to sneak away to the garage with your laptop and a lawn chair. As an added bonus, they'll actually hope you're out there smoking that cigarette you've been craving all morning.
6. Bring a Jacket, Gloves, and Voice-Activated Word Processing Software
Let's face it - your parents' garage is cold, especially over the holidays. And it's nearly impossible to type with gloves on. Or mittens. And mittens are warmer. Though they do make it pretty hard to clutch that cigarette you've been using as a dual-purpose lamp/nose warmer.
7. Stay Home
The decreased consumption of wine, spirits, and medicinal nicotine will lower your chances of diabetes, heart disease, and lung cancer by up to 30%. And you can assure your in-laws that this statistic is supported by irrefutable scientific evidence. And you'll soon have irrefutable proof that divorce is financially taxing.
8. Fake Your Own Death
Socially irresponsible? Naturally. Tasteless? Absolutely. Especially when your own mother discovers you very much alive on her trip to 7-Eleven to buy soda for the wake. I mean, really - those potato chips could have waited until after the priest consigned your immortal soul to God.
9. Drink. Then Drive.
Vehicular Manslaughter carries a pretty stiff prison sentence, so you'll have plenty of time to write after the trial. The downside is that it'll in be longhand on toilet paper. And if you've resorted to this for the sake of your writing, I'm guessing you weren't married in the first place.
10. Forget Writing: Bask in the Dysfunctionality that is Family
You've had a rough life - first childhood, then school, now this whole trying-to-make-ends-meet thing. Enjoy the few days you get with the people who will still invite you over for Thanksgiving after that whole fiasco with rehab. Actually listen to the loving words they have to say to you. Later, you can use these words as material for your bestseller. Or, failing this, you'll have a stronger testimony to rest on as the judge considers your plea of temporary insanity...
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Free and Instant Publication! The Joys of Hosting Your Own Website...and then Navigating the Minefield of Online Freedom
Okay, so I don't get to publish exactly for free...I pay like $6.95 a Month...but it's still my own website, and I can post whatever strikes my fancy. And this, perhaps, can be a problem.
One of the major strengths of the internet is the way we can access simply vast amounts of information at the click of a button. Yet, for all the convenience this offers, we also face the terrible specter of abuse. Information is often misrepresented online - just look at the way some businesses will fill out their own customer ratings to give themselves more "I loved this place!"-type reviews. Worse still, many individuals use the internet as their own hunting ground - I recently saw a poster at a bus stop here in Baltimore stating that one out of every five children is solicited online. Now, I don't know how they came up with the numbers (are 20% of American children online often enough to be solicited? Are 20% of our children visiting websites that would allow pedophiles access to their attention? I don't know...) However, we do know for fact that useful sites like craigslist and eBay have been used to sell nonexistent merchandise and even lure people out of their homes to be murdered. We do know that some children have been solicited online - an even just one child is one too many. And this is despite continual oversight by both the websites themselves and the authorities.
So what, then, should we think about the rest of the internet, the ones that fall in that middle ground somewhere between famous and utterly irrelevant? Places like www.12writingworkshopsonline.com? No one will punish me if I post bad writing advice. I could post outright lies, actually, and no one could do much - I don't offer services or require physical meetings which could endanger anyone's life, limb, or property. About the only thing illegal I could do would be to accept money for classes which were subsequently never taught - it's a possibility, certainly, but credit card companies do a good job of stopping that kind of behavior very quickly. (Not to mention I wouldn't be able to sleep at night - accepting someone's money is a bit more than a promise to do something, I think).
Money aside, though, how should we approach this freedom of the internet? Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "ignorance may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it" - and I believe very strongly in this. It is, perhaps, the ultimate defense of free speech. But how do we know this works online? How do we know that reason is combating ignorance? Do they have a little button on Google you can press to defend yourself? I'm thinking something along the lines of a link to "Combat Ignorance Now!" - maybe even make it a complete widget, with advanced tools like "Reference Wikipedia" and HTML code for "Fire Claymore."
Unfortunately, such automated functions will never exist. Or, if they ever do, they'll never work in the ways we require - by the time technology is advanced enough to provide such wonderful toys, we'll need something still more advanced just to keep tabs on the technology. (Terminator
fans, anyone?)
As writers, we are particularly vulnerable to the lures of the internet. Although we have many websites to protect our rights (SFWA's Writer Beware is a great example), the vast majority of writing websites are assembled by individuals like myself. For the most part, we're small-time or part-time writers looking to claim a bit of online real estate, build up a following, maybe even get our names out there. No one really checks up on us - no one needs to. We aren't dangerous - we're writers (lol...)
This decentralization mixed with the very portable nature of our work (an entire novel can be attached to a single e-mail of less than one megabyte...) makes it very possible for scams to weave their way among our numbers. Although the vast majority of writers, writing coaches, editors, and agents are legitimate, it only takes one bad one to ruin your year. You might find yourself paying hundreds (or possibly thousands...) of dollars for online workshops or editing services which aren't worth either the time or the money. You might even find yourself reading a website which tells you that everything you've ever thought about writing is absolutely wrong - that you should quit now and never write another word (note: even free advice can be bad advice). Or, in the true nightmare for the unpublished author, you may actually find someone to steal your manuscript and sell it as their own. (Please note: I have never heard of a single instance of this happening. But I know it's one of my nightmares. I know that other writers share this nightmare. In my opinion, most people dumb enough to steal a manuscript wouldn't be smart enough to market it. But it remains a compelling sort of nightmare...)
So what do you do? Well, I have a few suggestions. And I think these are focused just as much on keeping your sanity as protecting yourself:
1. Go to Real Live Writing Conferences
Online, it can be hard to know who you're talking with. At a real live conference, though, you can meet people, shake hands, exchange business cards. Many of these people have legitimate websites, and they offer very helpful services. Or they have friends who do. There's no better way to come in contact with reputable help than through word-of-mouth.
2. Talk to As Many Fellow Writers As Possible
I already know of a counterexample to Number 1 above - a friend of mine once paid very large amounts of money to a reputable writer for feedback that wasn't helpful. Meeting people in person is great, but it's best to meet lots of people, if possible. And this is where the internet is even more useful. If you see a writing website that looks interesting, and you really want to check it out, then there's a good chance that others have already visited and commented on it. Go ahead and Google the site you're interested in - you'll probably find feedback about the site (whether good or bad) that you can use to decide if it's a reputable link.
3. Use Your Own Judgement
In grade school, our biology teacher told us that when you get a bad feeling about something, there's probably a reason. And I believe this is very true online. If something seems too good to be true, or if the website just doesn't look the way you think it should for the services promised, then try to figure out what's up. It might be nothing, but you never know. A big giveaway, though, is spelling. If you're visiting a website that promises writing or editing services - and yet the site itself is filled with misspellings, typos, or grammatical errors - then there's a good chance that something is wrong.
4. Beware Those Fees!
On the internet (as in life), know what it is you're paying for. Any reputable vendor will let you know up-front what your money will buy. If someone offers a workshop or editing services for a fee, feel free to ask them how much you can expect for your money. My friend mentioned in Number 2 above would have been much better off had the reputable writer provided an estimate before doing the work. And this lesson should apply to your entire writing life, especially when you seek publication - be aware of the fees a typical agent will charge versus the fees your prospective agent will charge.
5. Always Know You Can Walk Away
If a website just doesn't provide what you want, don't feel obligated to use their services. If they're genuine, they'll understand. If they start sending you lots of e-mails promising "Oh, just give us one more try" or "you should think twice about passing up our Deluxe Service," then that's all the more reason to walk away. (Honestly, anyone who abuses your e-mail should be ignored. All reputable vendors I know of will offer you the opportunity to be removed from their e-mail lists).
6. Tell Others About Your Experiences
Nothing can be more helpful - or more damning - than word of mouth. If you've had a positive experience with a website, let your friends know. If a website provides an exceptional service, post that on your own website. Likewise, if you are dissatisfied with a website (e.g. "Those F***ers totally S****ed me!), then you should post this to online forums somewhere. And it doesn't matter where - whenever most of the links to a site say "Don't go here, these F***ers will S**** you," then people tend to stop going to that site.
(You'll note that here on www.12writingworkshopsonline.com I provide links to sites like HostMonster and thesitewizard.com and Storm the Castle. This is because these websites have made my own site possible. For full disclosure, though, I do receive a commission from HostMonster if you click their link on my site and then sign up for a website through them. It's the same with all the Amazon
books listed on the site. I still recommend them, of course, but you have a right to know where I'm coming from.)
Conclusion
I hope this article has been interesting and helpful. If you have comments on it, or you'd like to relate some of your internet writing experiences, please feel free to comment below. Of, if you prefer, you can visit our homepage and then follow the links to contact me directly.
Happy Writing!
Ryan
One of the major strengths of the internet is the way we can access simply vast amounts of information at the click of a button. Yet, for all the convenience this offers, we also face the terrible specter of abuse. Information is often misrepresented online - just look at the way some businesses will fill out their own customer ratings to give themselves more "I loved this place!"-type reviews. Worse still, many individuals use the internet as their own hunting ground - I recently saw a poster at a bus stop here in Baltimore stating that one out of every five children is solicited online. Now, I don't know how they came up with the numbers (are 20% of American children online often enough to be solicited? Are 20% of our children visiting websites that would allow pedophiles access to their attention? I don't know...) However, we do know for fact that useful sites like craigslist and eBay have been used to sell nonexistent merchandise and even lure people out of their homes to be murdered. We do know that some children have been solicited online - an even just one child is one too many. And this is despite continual oversight by both the websites themselves and the authorities.
So what, then, should we think about the rest of the internet, the ones that fall in that middle ground somewhere between famous and utterly irrelevant? Places like www.12writingworkshopsonline.com? No one will punish me if I post bad writing advice. I could post outright lies, actually, and no one could do much - I don't offer services or require physical meetings which could endanger anyone's life, limb, or property. About the only thing illegal I could do would be to accept money for classes which were subsequently never taught - it's a possibility, certainly, but credit card companies do a good job of stopping that kind of behavior very quickly. (Not to mention I wouldn't be able to sleep at night - accepting someone's money is a bit more than a promise to do something, I think).
Money aside, though, how should we approach this freedom of the internet? Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "ignorance may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it" - and I believe very strongly in this. It is, perhaps, the ultimate defense of free speech. But how do we know this works online? How do we know that reason is combating ignorance? Do they have a little button on Google you can press to defend yourself? I'm thinking something along the lines of a link to "Combat Ignorance Now!" - maybe even make it a complete widget, with advanced tools like "Reference Wikipedia" and HTML code for "Fire Claymore."
Unfortunately, such automated functions will never exist. Or, if they ever do, they'll never work in the ways we require - by the time technology is advanced enough to provide such wonderful toys, we'll need something still more advanced just to keep tabs on the technology. (Terminator
fans, anyone?)As writers, we are particularly vulnerable to the lures of the internet. Although we have many websites to protect our rights (SFWA's Writer Beware is a great example), the vast majority of writing websites are assembled by individuals like myself. For the most part, we're small-time or part-time writers looking to claim a bit of online real estate, build up a following, maybe even get our names out there. No one really checks up on us - no one needs to. We aren't dangerous - we're writers (lol...)
This decentralization mixed with the very portable nature of our work (an entire novel can be attached to a single e-mail of less than one megabyte...) makes it very possible for scams to weave their way among our numbers. Although the vast majority of writers, writing coaches, editors, and agents are legitimate, it only takes one bad one to ruin your year. You might find yourself paying hundreds (or possibly thousands...) of dollars for online workshops or editing services which aren't worth either the time or the money. You might even find yourself reading a website which tells you that everything you've ever thought about writing is absolutely wrong - that you should quit now and never write another word (note: even free advice can be bad advice). Or, in the true nightmare for the unpublished author, you may actually find someone to steal your manuscript and sell it as their own. (Please note: I have never heard of a single instance of this happening. But I know it's one of my nightmares. I know that other writers share this nightmare. In my opinion, most people dumb enough to steal a manuscript wouldn't be smart enough to market it. But it remains a compelling sort of nightmare...)
So what do you do? Well, I have a few suggestions. And I think these are focused just as much on keeping your sanity as protecting yourself:
1. Go to Real Live Writing Conferences
Online, it can be hard to know who you're talking with. At a real live conference, though, you can meet people, shake hands, exchange business cards. Many of these people have legitimate websites, and they offer very helpful services. Or they have friends who do. There's no better way to come in contact with reputable help than through word-of-mouth.
2. Talk to As Many Fellow Writers As Possible
I already know of a counterexample to Number 1 above - a friend of mine once paid very large amounts of money to a reputable writer for feedback that wasn't helpful. Meeting people in person is great, but it's best to meet lots of people, if possible. And this is where the internet is even more useful. If you see a writing website that looks interesting, and you really want to check it out, then there's a good chance that others have already visited and commented on it. Go ahead and Google the site you're interested in - you'll probably find feedback about the site (whether good or bad) that you can use to decide if it's a reputable link.
3. Use Your Own Judgement
In grade school, our biology teacher told us that when you get a bad feeling about something, there's probably a reason. And I believe this is very true online. If something seems too good to be true, or if the website just doesn't look the way you think it should for the services promised, then try to figure out what's up. It might be nothing, but you never know. A big giveaway, though, is spelling. If you're visiting a website that promises writing or editing services - and yet the site itself is filled with misspellings, typos, or grammatical errors - then there's a good chance that something is wrong.
4. Beware Those Fees!
On the internet (as in life), know what it is you're paying for. Any reputable vendor will let you know up-front what your money will buy. If someone offers a workshop or editing services for a fee, feel free to ask them how much you can expect for your money. My friend mentioned in Number 2 above would have been much better off had the reputable writer provided an estimate before doing the work. And this lesson should apply to your entire writing life, especially when you seek publication - be aware of the fees a typical agent will charge versus the fees your prospective agent will charge.
5. Always Know You Can Walk Away
If a website just doesn't provide what you want, don't feel obligated to use their services. If they're genuine, they'll understand. If they start sending you lots of e-mails promising "Oh, just give us one more try" or "you should think twice about passing up our Deluxe Service," then that's all the more reason to walk away. (Honestly, anyone who abuses your e-mail should be ignored. All reputable vendors I know of will offer you the opportunity to be removed from their e-mail lists).
6. Tell Others About Your Experiences
Nothing can be more helpful - or more damning - than word of mouth. If you've had a positive experience with a website, let your friends know. If a website provides an exceptional service, post that on your own website. Likewise, if you are dissatisfied with a website (e.g. "Those F***ers totally S****ed me!), then you should post this to online forums somewhere. And it doesn't matter where - whenever most of the links to a site say "Don't go here, these F***ers will S**** you," then people tend to stop going to that site.
(You'll note that here on www.12writingworkshopsonline.com I provide links to sites like HostMonster and thesitewizard.com and Storm the Castle. This is because these websites have made my own site possible. For full disclosure, though, I do receive a commission from HostMonster if you click their link on my site and then sign up for a website through them. It's the same with all the Amazon
books listed on the site. I still recommend them, of course, but you have a right to know where I'm coming from.)Conclusion
I hope this article has been interesting and helpful. If you have comments on it, or you'd like to relate some of your internet writing experiences, please feel free to comment below. Of, if you prefer, you can visit our homepage and then follow the links to contact me directly.
Happy Writing!
Ryan
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Welcome to the 1-2-Writing Blog!
On a website like this, it's important to develop a genuine community of writers. This blog is dedicated to bringing in many writers who will share their thoughts, their perspectives, and their techniques for creative writing. My hope is that this blog will serve as a central place for inspiration on the site.
Happy Writing!
Ryan
Happy Writing!
Ryan
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Blogging Thoughts
Websites are a funny thing. I started 1-2-Writing after a few less-than-positive experiences with writing workshops - both online and in-person. The biggest problem I ran into was price - I was paying money for workshops (some rather serious money - $500 for one of the online courses I took) and getting some really bad service. It wasn't that I disagreed with the feedback or that the instructors were people I didn't like - it just seemed like they didn't know how to teach. They were good writers, great people, but not very well organized. I wouldn't have minded if the workshops were free, but they weren't. It didn't help that I was barely employed at the time - I had just gotten out of the Army, I was paying rent for the first time in my life, and the only jobs I had were these part-time spots that barely covered rent, let alone food and health insurance and car insurance and my internet cable and...but who's counting? When you get to the point that you're buying generic dried beans from Harris Teeter so you can make a batch of chili that's even cheaper than the last batch, you get a bit irate after dropping a few hundred dollars for a writing course that doesn't pay off.
Like I said, though, it wasn't that I disagreed with the feedback. The real problem was the relative lack of feedback. The course for which I paid $500 was a 15 week novel writing course - I received no feedback from the instructor until after I submitted my third assignment some nine weeks into the course (and trust me, two months is a long time to wait for feedback worth $500). We were told the problem was instructor illness, and then the course was extended, and a new instructor brought in, but it was very hard to get back in the swing of things. The web administrator offered us all $250 refunds, but there was no reply back when I e-mailed in.
You can imagine that this experience turned me off to online workshops. Unfortunately, I think I was one of the lucky ones. After this experience, I made it into an MFA program, so I don't pay money for writing courses now. But I have friends who do. I've seen one friend pay a very, very large amount of money (thousands of dollars) for writing help with turned out to be little more than line edits. And it galls me because there isn't a lot I can do about it. I'm not exactly famous, I can't exactly say I've written enough to argue with these instructors who've published several books each. All I have out there is a short story and the fact that I'm earning in MFA. But I do have some knowledge. Maybe I haven't published much yet, but I've written a lot, especially compared to where I was when I first dropped engineering to pursue creative writing. It's not so much that I know enough to teach everything, but I can teach more than some of my teachers have. They may have known more, but they didn't have the time or - in my opinion - the knowledge of teaching necessary to convey their experience.
That, however, was two years ago - before I'd even finished applying to MFA programs. Since then, I've taught three semesters of undergraduate writing as part of our MFA program. What amazes me the most about teaching is not how much I know about writing, but how much I still have to learn about teaching. I've had to reconsider what I thought about the $500 instructor who disappeared. Sometimes, I wonder what I would really do if I became so sick that I couldn't teach - I'm not sure I would want my students to know just how sick I really was, and it's possible that she really couldn't continue with the course. And although I feel that I am a better teacher than some instructors I've met, I realize now that I am not the best teacher out there, not by far. Over the years, I've learned how to provide good feedback and good encouragement, but I've taken workshops from teachers who can literally light up a room. Two teachers I highly recommend for anyone who has a chance - Zelda Lockhart and Pat Schneider - changed the way I write. Another writer who I've only met through an online workshop - Karlyn Thayer - really kept me going when I was first learning to tighten my short stories. I wish I had space here to list all the teachers who've helped me - there's no way I would have made it even this far without the help of many, many people, most of whom I've only known for brief periods between moving. I have more than enough proof that writing workshops do work - maybe not always, and maybe not perfectly, but they do help your writing.
And something else to consider is what I've learned from the writing instructors who weren't as helpful. Sometimes, the books that best show you how to write well are the ones where you can see where the writing failed - I think the same is true for writing workshops. The great workshops gave me the experience and the desire necessary to take up writing - it was the bad ones that pushed me to take charge of my writing, to stop waiting for my writing to "improve enough" for me just just start publishing. What I've found is that it doesn't happen that way - some days you write well, some days you write through setback, and some days are so bad that you want to write but can't. Regardless of the situation, regardless of where you're at or the resources you have, you have to keep faith in your writing and push onward. If you read a book that's terrible, you sit down to write another one - if you take a workshop that's not worth the money, you start a website and do better.
With this thought, I encourage each of you to keep up the faith and know that, whatever your publications or lack of publications, you're a writer. And something I've learned over the years is very simple, but many people forget either one side of it or the other: every writer has something to learn, and every writer has something to teach us.
Happy Writing,
Ryan
Like I said, though, it wasn't that I disagreed with the feedback. The real problem was the relative lack of feedback. The course for which I paid $500 was a 15 week novel writing course - I received no feedback from the instructor until after I submitted my third assignment some nine weeks into the course (and trust me, two months is a long time to wait for feedback worth $500). We were told the problem was instructor illness, and then the course was extended, and a new instructor brought in, but it was very hard to get back in the swing of things. The web administrator offered us all $250 refunds, but there was no reply back when I e-mailed in.
You can imagine that this experience turned me off to online workshops. Unfortunately, I think I was one of the lucky ones. After this experience, I made it into an MFA program, so I don't pay money for writing courses now. But I have friends who do. I've seen one friend pay a very, very large amount of money (thousands of dollars) for writing help with turned out to be little more than line edits. And it galls me because there isn't a lot I can do about it. I'm not exactly famous, I can't exactly say I've written enough to argue with these instructors who've published several books each. All I have out there is a short story and the fact that I'm earning in MFA. But I do have some knowledge. Maybe I haven't published much yet, but I've written a lot, especially compared to where I was when I first dropped engineering to pursue creative writing. It's not so much that I know enough to teach everything, but I can teach more than some of my teachers have. They may have known more, but they didn't have the time or - in my opinion - the knowledge of teaching necessary to convey their experience.
That, however, was two years ago - before I'd even finished applying to MFA programs. Since then, I've taught three semesters of undergraduate writing as part of our MFA program. What amazes me the most about teaching is not how much I know about writing, but how much I still have to learn about teaching. I've had to reconsider what I thought about the $500 instructor who disappeared. Sometimes, I wonder what I would really do if I became so sick that I couldn't teach - I'm not sure I would want my students to know just how sick I really was, and it's possible that she really couldn't continue with the course. And although I feel that I am a better teacher than some instructors I've met, I realize now that I am not the best teacher out there, not by far. Over the years, I've learned how to provide good feedback and good encouragement, but I've taken workshops from teachers who can literally light up a room. Two teachers I highly recommend for anyone who has a chance - Zelda Lockhart and Pat Schneider - changed the way I write. Another writer who I've only met through an online workshop - Karlyn Thayer - really kept me going when I was first learning to tighten my short stories. I wish I had space here to list all the teachers who've helped me - there's no way I would have made it even this far without the help of many, many people, most of whom I've only known for brief periods between moving. I have more than enough proof that writing workshops do work - maybe not always, and maybe not perfectly, but they do help your writing.
And something else to consider is what I've learned from the writing instructors who weren't as helpful. Sometimes, the books that best show you how to write well are the ones where you can see where the writing failed - I think the same is true for writing workshops. The great workshops gave me the experience and the desire necessary to take up writing - it was the bad ones that pushed me to take charge of my writing, to stop waiting for my writing to "improve enough" for me just just start publishing. What I've found is that it doesn't happen that way - some days you write well, some days you write through setback, and some days are so bad that you want to write but can't. Regardless of the situation, regardless of where you're at or the resources you have, you have to keep faith in your writing and push onward. If you read a book that's terrible, you sit down to write another one - if you take a workshop that's not worth the money, you start a website and do better.
With this thought, I encourage each of you to keep up the faith and know that, whatever your publications or lack of publications, you're a writer. And something I've learned over the years is very simple, but many people forget either one side of it or the other: every writer has something to learn, and every writer has something to teach us.
Happy Writing,
Ryan
Friday, August 29, 2008
Return from the Wilderness
Seriously, the past four months or so feel like I've been in the wilderness. I was only out of internet and phone range for eight weeks, but my work on the website and my writing and everything else literature related has been flagging terribly. It hasn't been happening. The pen had run dry, and I was busy.
For me, it's been a dry spell for writing, but so much fun in so many other ways. I've set up a new apartment in Baltimore, I'm starting on my MFA, and I'm surrounded by people who aren't just working at writing, but are working their lives around writing. I, finally, am working my life around writing. And it's a great feeling. But all these months leading up to it have been the exact opposite. Instead of writing, I've been...doing other things. I've lead science students on hiking trips through the forests of West Virginia. I've seen the 2.3 acre radio telescope at Green Bank - the worlds largest moving object on land, the most precise radio telescope on the planet. I've said hello and goodbye to nearly two hundred of my best friends. I've attended lectures on global warming and breast cancer and maple syrup disease. I've talked with friends I hadn't seen in ten years, given writing seminars, driven a U-Haul on Pennsylvania Avenue through D.C. during rush hour, chased people with water balloons...and of course I was the one who got wet...
What, then, does this mean for my writing? Have I given up my novels? Do I have to relearn the short story? Am I stuck now with writers block?
The answer to all of the above is no. I stopped my forward progress, but I didn't stop my writing. I've been writing snippets of things all summer - morning show ditties, impromptu songs for my girlfriend, 10-minute free-writes with science students. But none of these short works have been typed, none of them are "publishable" or even really manageable. They fill up notebooks of all shapes and sizes, pretty much whatever paper I had on hand at the time. It's unlikely that any of them will ever show up here or anywhere else online. There were, in fact, no Dagny stories, not a one (and if you know who Dagny is, you understand what this means...the word "payback" comes to mind...)
Often, as writers, we fall prey to this myth that all our stories must be good. We believe that we must craft every word to be if not perfect then at the very least great. Sometimes, we'll spend days and months and years worrying over the same story, trying to get the elements just right. We rebalance the plot, reconstruct our characters, deconstruct the setting and the mood and the tone of our stories. We revise the one story until we're tired of it. And to become professional creative writers - the kind of people who get paid for stories and poems - this process is crucial to future success. Publishers and MFA faculty want to see the best we have to offer. They want to see that we're worth the time to read. But for many writers, this process of revision gets confused with the process of creation. Oftentimes, we credit ourselves with growing as writers because we have made one story better.
Don't stop with one story. Experiment. Spend ten minutes writing something that you know you'll throw away. Skip the laptop routine and scratch out a few words that you won't share with others. With writing, an essential aspect of mastery is practice. As in any field, be it sports or science or music, we become good because we experiment. Every professional violin soloist spent years if not decades scratching out notes that would torture the human ear - and it's that practice which provided them the confidence and skill to be performers today. It is the same with writing. Just as no violinist would spend an entire lifetime playing a single concerto to the exclusion of all others, as writers we cannot afford to work on a single novel or a single poem to the exclusion of all else. There are too many techniques, too many ideas, too many facets of life to chain ourselves - and our literary careers - to the quality of a single piece. We must break ourselves of the idea that every story will be good and realize that experimentation is as much a process of elimination as it is a process of creation. We create, we judge, and we sift the gems from the sand. But trust me, there are no diamonds without a lot - and I mean a lot - of rough.
This said, let me leave you with a bit of guesstimation regarding my own work. In my apartment, I have an entire file box filled with stories I wrote before and during high school - thousands of pages of original, handwritten work. On my computer, I have my stories sorted by year - from 2002 until now, we're looking at probably twenty to a hundred stories per year. Some of these stories were meant as novels, some as novellas, some as shorts, some as still-births. One of the stories weighs in at 190,000 words, and it even has an ending. Out of these hundreds of thousands of words - actually millions of words spend for several hundred story ideas - I have about fifteen short stories that I'm happy with. I have one short novel that I'm happy with. I have half of another novel that I'm happy with, but it doesn't have an ending. And out of all this? One short, short story has been published so far - I earned $100 for it back in February. And why am I starting on a master in fine arts? Because I'm not that great of a writer. I want to be better. I want to learn what it will take to be better.
So as you write, remember to break out of the house every once in a while. Try that wild, off-the-wall story idea that probably won't work. Don't worry about wasting time. Don't worry about whether it's "worth" your time. All writing is worthwhile. All writing is worth producing. It might not be worth reading when your done, but that's okay. It's part of the learning. We cannot succeed until we learn how not to fail.
For me, it's been a dry spell for writing, but so much fun in so many other ways. I've set up a new apartment in Baltimore, I'm starting on my MFA, and I'm surrounded by people who aren't just working at writing, but are working their lives around writing. I, finally, am working my life around writing. And it's a great feeling. But all these months leading up to it have been the exact opposite. Instead of writing, I've been...doing other things. I've lead science students on hiking trips through the forests of West Virginia. I've seen the 2.3 acre radio telescope at Green Bank - the worlds largest moving object on land, the most precise radio telescope on the planet. I've said hello and goodbye to nearly two hundred of my best friends. I've attended lectures on global warming and breast cancer and maple syrup disease. I've talked with friends I hadn't seen in ten years, given writing seminars, driven a U-Haul on Pennsylvania Avenue through D.C. during rush hour, chased people with water balloons...and of course I was the one who got wet...
What, then, does this mean for my writing? Have I given up my novels? Do I have to relearn the short story? Am I stuck now with writers block?
The answer to all of the above is no. I stopped my forward progress, but I didn't stop my writing. I've been writing snippets of things all summer - morning show ditties, impromptu songs for my girlfriend, 10-minute free-writes with science students. But none of these short works have been typed, none of them are "publishable" or even really manageable. They fill up notebooks of all shapes and sizes, pretty much whatever paper I had on hand at the time. It's unlikely that any of them will ever show up here or anywhere else online. There were, in fact, no Dagny stories, not a one (and if you know who Dagny is, you understand what this means...the word "payback" comes to mind...)
Often, as writers, we fall prey to this myth that all our stories must be good. We believe that we must craft every word to be if not perfect then at the very least great. Sometimes, we'll spend days and months and years worrying over the same story, trying to get the elements just right. We rebalance the plot, reconstruct our characters, deconstruct the setting and the mood and the tone of our stories. We revise the one story until we're tired of it. And to become professional creative writers - the kind of people who get paid for stories and poems - this process is crucial to future success. Publishers and MFA faculty want to see the best we have to offer. They want to see that we're worth the time to read. But for many writers, this process of revision gets confused with the process of creation. Oftentimes, we credit ourselves with growing as writers because we have made one story better.
Don't stop with one story. Experiment. Spend ten minutes writing something that you know you'll throw away. Skip the laptop routine and scratch out a few words that you won't share with others. With writing, an essential aspect of mastery is practice. As in any field, be it sports or science or music, we become good because we experiment. Every professional violin soloist spent years if not decades scratching out notes that would torture the human ear - and it's that practice which provided them the confidence and skill to be performers today. It is the same with writing. Just as no violinist would spend an entire lifetime playing a single concerto to the exclusion of all others, as writers we cannot afford to work on a single novel or a single poem to the exclusion of all else. There are too many techniques, too many ideas, too many facets of life to chain ourselves - and our literary careers - to the quality of a single piece. We must break ourselves of the idea that every story will be good and realize that experimentation is as much a process of elimination as it is a process of creation. We create, we judge, and we sift the gems from the sand. But trust me, there are no diamonds without a lot - and I mean a lot - of rough.
This said, let me leave you with a bit of guesstimation regarding my own work. In my apartment, I have an entire file box filled with stories I wrote before and during high school - thousands of pages of original, handwritten work. On my computer, I have my stories sorted by year - from 2002 until now, we're looking at probably twenty to a hundred stories per year. Some of these stories were meant as novels, some as novellas, some as shorts, some as still-births. One of the stories weighs in at 190,000 words, and it even has an ending. Out of these hundreds of thousands of words - actually millions of words spend for several hundred story ideas - I have about fifteen short stories that I'm happy with. I have one short novel that I'm happy with. I have half of another novel that I'm happy with, but it doesn't have an ending. And out of all this? One short, short story has been published so far - I earned $100 for it back in February. And why am I starting on a master in fine arts? Because I'm not that great of a writer. I want to be better. I want to learn what it will take to be better.
So as you write, remember to break out of the house every once in a while. Try that wild, off-the-wall story idea that probably won't work. Don't worry about wasting time. Don't worry about whether it's "worth" your time. All writing is worthwhile. All writing is worth producing. It might not be worth reading when your done, but that's okay. It's part of the learning. We cannot succeed until we learn how not to fail.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Writing through Distraction
Freewriting's open, free-form structure is great for the office, the beach, the classroom - anywhere you go that allows only snatches of time to write your story. Since the free-write is usually not intended as a marketable story, you don't have to worry about typos or smudges or whether you can concentrate enough to make the story "good." But it still takes concentration to write, especially to "get in the groove" and write fast.
This is where your real-world setting can pose some problems - the distractions around you may threaten to short-circuit your creative process. Fighting the distraction often makes things worse - using these distractions to your advantage, on the other hand, can actually help generate new ideas.
This is where your real-world setting can pose some problems - the distractions around you may threaten to short-circuit your creative process. Fighting the distraction often makes things worse - using these distractions to your advantage, on the other hand, can actually help generate new ideas.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Cheeky Characters Write Themselves
Yesterday, I had the sad job of watching a story die on the page. It shouldn’t have died, I figured – it was the prologue. It had all the elements of a good prologue – a protagonist scorned, a world of injustice, the start of a very long journey. And yet the story stopped. I made it halfway to the end of prologue and found nothing more to write. This bothered me because the novel’s already half-written. After 42,000 words of novel, what’s a few hundred words of prologue? Why would it be so hard to write a stirring introduction to a story that’s already halfway done?
The problem was expectation. As I noted in “Hit Your Muse With a Rock,” expectation can kill inspiration where it counts most – on paper. As writers, we struggle with two expectations – we expect a certain quality in our words, and we expect a certain ability in ourselves. In good writers, these expectations are not necessarily in agreement, but they are in harmony. The writer expects that he or she can write, and the words produced generally meet the expectation of decent work. But most beginning writers face the problem of low self-esteem coupled with an intense desire to write something good, to write something incredible. The low self-esteem results from lack of practice, and the desire is a natural product of Barnes and Noble. Today, we are surrounded by good books. Even the second-tier authors we rarely hear of are very good writers. As human beings, we feel that we have to match their performance in order to join their ranks.
This expectation of great work kills the creative process. It turns writers into control freaks. We spent hours mulling over the meaning of a single line, lose precious minutes trying to decide between “he said” and “said he.” The momentum of the moment stalls as the process of writing gives way to the process of frustration.
Unfortunately, lesser expectation often creates the same problem. Yesterday, my prologue had little chance of greatness. I wasn’t looking for great – I was looking for an introduction, a way to explain the character who stars in my novel. When the story stalled, I shrugged and walked away. I figured inspiration would come to me, but it didn’t. The expectation that killed this work was a desire to mold the character myself, to control the outcome of this prologue to match the novel. I had turned into a control freak of limited scope, but the effect was equally devastating – the story stopped. The words ran dry. The prologue sat unfinished.
My story needs a prologue, so I’ll start it again. But on the second try, I will remember the cardinal rule of fiction – the best protagonists write themselves.
Now, you’re wondering how I can label this the “cardinal rule.” If I had a dollar for every “first rule of writing” I’ve heard, I wouldn’t need to publish to pay the rent. But the fact is, life is about conflict. Great stories are about conflict. Readers sit riveted because they want to know what happens next, because they can’t predict from page one the outcome of page two. But if you want to keep readers in their seats through page four hundred, you must maintain the same unpredictable tension on every page of the book, whether it’s page one, two, or three-seventy-three.
There are two processes you can use to accomplish this. In the first process, you can carefully plan out a riveting story and then write it. I don’t recommend this. Very few writers can pull it off. This method fails because the inner control freak gets free reign. In the outline, every plot twist seems simply stunning. But in the manuscript, as you’re trying to foreshadow and trying to build tension and trying to insert the critical plot twist – everything just like it says on the outline – the story stagnates. It sounds dry. It’s a lot of trying and not a lot of “let’s see what happens next.”
The second process is better. Start with your character, and then write. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going to write a good story – in many ways, it’s better if you don’t. Pick your favorite fictional protagonist – I’m fond of Jane Eyre, myself – and think about what you enjoyed about that character. Was it the way the character reacted to the world? The words the character said? The way they always managed to do the “right” thing, even if it was unexpected or simply outrageous?
Characters don’t achieve this kind of free-spirited winner-take-all success through outlines. They become flesh-and-blood heroines through their own quirks and their own ways of viewing the world. They become realistic because the author allows the character the freedom to pick what comes next. Stories are about conflict, yes, but they are most riveting when they are about personal conflict, the kind of struggle that rocks the protagonist to her bones.
The prologue I couldn’t finish failed in that regard. I inserted my protagonist, but then I withheld the conflict. I made it a secret. She didn’t know that she was walking into a trap, or that she was about to start her long journey. She had nothing to do but stand and wait.
Readers hate waiting. And it’s a dull theme to write. I grew bored, and the writing stopped. When I start again – from the beginning – the protagonist will know the conflict. She’ll know what she’s fighting for – or at least what she’s fighting against. And I’ll have an idea of what the protagonist will do, but I won’t know. That part’s up to her. As a full-grown character, she has to make decisions. She has to be an adult because that’s what readers want to see – an adult making grown-up decisions regarding her own life, regardless of how twisted the world she’s written into.
So as you go forth and write, remember to ease up on your protagonists. Allow them the freedom to make the choices that you yourself would not make. If the protagonist wants to try something outside your plans for the story, go with it. Try it out. Let the characters speak for themselves. You’ll have more fun, as will your readers.
The problem was expectation. As I noted in “Hit Your Muse With a Rock,” expectation can kill inspiration where it counts most – on paper. As writers, we struggle with two expectations – we expect a certain quality in our words, and we expect a certain ability in ourselves. In good writers, these expectations are not necessarily in agreement, but they are in harmony. The writer expects that he or she can write, and the words produced generally meet the expectation of decent work. But most beginning writers face the problem of low self-esteem coupled with an intense desire to write something good, to write something incredible. The low self-esteem results from lack of practice, and the desire is a natural product of Barnes and Noble. Today, we are surrounded by good books. Even the second-tier authors we rarely hear of are very good writers. As human beings, we feel that we have to match their performance in order to join their ranks.
This expectation of great work kills the creative process. It turns writers into control freaks. We spent hours mulling over the meaning of a single line, lose precious minutes trying to decide between “he said” and “said he.” The momentum of the moment stalls as the process of writing gives way to the process of frustration.
Unfortunately, lesser expectation often creates the same problem. Yesterday, my prologue had little chance of greatness. I wasn’t looking for great – I was looking for an introduction, a way to explain the character who stars in my novel. When the story stalled, I shrugged and walked away. I figured inspiration would come to me, but it didn’t. The expectation that killed this work was a desire to mold the character myself, to control the outcome of this prologue to match the novel. I had turned into a control freak of limited scope, but the effect was equally devastating – the story stopped. The words ran dry. The prologue sat unfinished.
My story needs a prologue, so I’ll start it again. But on the second try, I will remember the cardinal rule of fiction – the best protagonists write themselves.
Now, you’re wondering how I can label this the “cardinal rule.” If I had a dollar for every “first rule of writing” I’ve heard, I wouldn’t need to publish to pay the rent. But the fact is, life is about conflict. Great stories are about conflict. Readers sit riveted because they want to know what happens next, because they can’t predict from page one the outcome of page two. But if you want to keep readers in their seats through page four hundred, you must maintain the same unpredictable tension on every page of the book, whether it’s page one, two, or three-seventy-three.
There are two processes you can use to accomplish this. In the first process, you can carefully plan out a riveting story and then write it. I don’t recommend this. Very few writers can pull it off. This method fails because the inner control freak gets free reign. In the outline, every plot twist seems simply stunning. But in the manuscript, as you’re trying to foreshadow and trying to build tension and trying to insert the critical plot twist – everything just like it says on the outline – the story stagnates. It sounds dry. It’s a lot of trying and not a lot of “let’s see what happens next.”
The second process is better. Start with your character, and then write. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going to write a good story – in many ways, it’s better if you don’t. Pick your favorite fictional protagonist – I’m fond of Jane Eyre, myself – and think about what you enjoyed about that character. Was it the way the character reacted to the world? The words the character said? The way they always managed to do the “right” thing, even if it was unexpected or simply outrageous?
Characters don’t achieve this kind of free-spirited winner-take-all success through outlines. They become flesh-and-blood heroines through their own quirks and their own ways of viewing the world. They become realistic because the author allows the character the freedom to pick what comes next. Stories are about conflict, yes, but they are most riveting when they are about personal conflict, the kind of struggle that rocks the protagonist to her bones.
The prologue I couldn’t finish failed in that regard. I inserted my protagonist, but then I withheld the conflict. I made it a secret. She didn’t know that she was walking into a trap, or that she was about to start her long journey. She had nothing to do but stand and wait.
Readers hate waiting. And it’s a dull theme to write. I grew bored, and the writing stopped. When I start again – from the beginning – the protagonist will know the conflict. She’ll know what she’s fighting for – or at least what she’s fighting against. And I’ll have an idea of what the protagonist will do, but I won’t know. That part’s up to her. As a full-grown character, she has to make decisions. She has to be an adult because that’s what readers want to see – an adult making grown-up decisions regarding her own life, regardless of how twisted the world she’s written into.
So as you go forth and write, remember to ease up on your protagonists. Allow them the freedom to make the choices that you yourself would not make. If the protagonist wants to try something outside your plans for the story, go with it. Try it out. Let the characters speak for themselves. You’ll have more fun, as will your readers.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Hit Your Muse With a Rock
There is a very healthy market of books on how to write and – more importantly – how to find inspiration. Every day, frustrated writers struggle with getting their characters on paper – they battle writer’s block and boredom and the conviction that the story isn’t worth writing. They rack their brains for ideas on how to liven the story, how to make it work, how to “find their muse.” And yes, many of them are sitting in the chair, hand on pencil, eyes on the page as they struggle, so it isn’t even an issue of taking the time to write. It’s an issue of making the writing fit the time.
Seriously, when your muse deserts you like this, hit her with a rock.
Blink. A rock? How can I advocate hitting an imaginary goddess of inspiration with a rock?
It’s simple. When a story stalls, that’s your invitation to write whatever comes to mind. You can begin with the most outlandish words you can think of. For example: “Muse, dear, I’m mad at you. I need a good story. Why aren’t you helping me? I’m throwing a brick your way.”
It sounds like a twisted form of on-the-couch therapy, but the key to this technique is that you write as you do it. Writer’s block is so harmful because it stops your desire to write. It halts the pen with thoughts of inadequacy. Hitting your muse with a rock is not the way to start the Great American Novel. What I’m advocating is a way to break that writer’s block. This probably won’t produce words you can use, and anyone looking over your shoulder might wonder at your sanity when the muse writes back with “Oh yeah? A rock? Is that the best you’ve got, writer-boy?” But this technique will get you writing. It will get thoughts from your mind onto the page, reopening the all-important path between eyes and pen.
This technique is actually a modified version of freewriting. Most writers use freewriting entirely off-the-manuscript. They find a fresh scrap of paper, scribble away for fifteen minutes or so to get in the head of their protagonist, and then they return to their typing. Hitting the muse with a rock requires no such interruption. As you sit before the precious manuscript with nothing to say, you duke it out with your muse right there. You type it onto your manuscript wherever it is you happen to be. Sure, the muse holds no real part in the story, but it relieves a lot of stress to throw rocks on paper. It loosens up the manuscript itself. Remember that writer’s block is the result of high expectation for the manuscript coupled with low expectations of your own abilities. Both of these impulses are wrong. A manuscript is never all-important – when you’re still at the stage for writer’s block, you’re sitting before a first or maybe a second draft. The story isn’t done yet. There’s plenty of room for change. Throw some bricks – you can always delete them later. A press of a key or a swipe of the pen restores the original work.
The secret, of course, is that you don’t need to throw bricks. You don’t need to involve your muse. As you develop this technique, you can focus it to meet the needs of your story. I discovered how much fun this can be during National Novel Writing Month, that wild month of the 50,000 word novel. For NaNoWriMo, the only requirement is word count, but getting that word count is hard. A week of writer’s block can be a deathblow to your work. To produce 1,667 words a day during the month of Thanksgiving and Christmas Shopping, every moment counts. You have to be focused and you have to be excited. The fingers must fly. So I began throwing rocks at my protagonists. Rocks, dragons, tanks, even a computer that was allergic to water. I tossed in absurd challenges, ideas that I would have never written had I taken the time to worry about the final product.
Strangely, the story I wrote worked. The protagonists fought back. Parts of the work seemed silly and ridiculous, I kept writing. The audacity of the story kept me in my seat – I never knew what would happen next, but I always knew I could find another rock.
There’s a reason why this technique works. Deep down, every story is about conflict. It’s about a protagonist facing a challenge and learning to overcome. Challenge on the page takes many forms, but you can imagine it as throwing a rock. Remember that your rock can represent any difficulty. It can be the prom dress that doesn’t fit. It can be the spooky neighbor who invites your protagonist to see the windowless basement after dinner. It can be the cute crush who’s too nice and too funny and to perfect for your protagonist to bear thinking about.
How does your protagonist respond to the rock? Does she duck aside, find her own rock, and throw it back at you? Or does she catch it in the stomach and throw up? Don’t think about it – write it. The key to this technique is to write every step of the way. Keep it fun. Pick an unusual rock, something that does not fit with the rest of your story. Has the heroic knight of the quantum order defeated the horrible space dragon? Give him the queen’s baby nephew to keep quiet for an hour. Has your heroine survived budget cuts and layoffs to become the executive vice president? Maybe her boss the vampire invites her to a round of midnight golf.
Remember, the goal here is not to write the Great American Novel. The goal is to break through writer’s block and to keep writing, to get the ideas free-flowing. Sometimes, you may discover an entertaining twist that you enjoy more than the original story. Other times, you’ll get a good laugh, reconnect with your characters, and then pick up from where you left off. The hardest part is letting go. You have to relax, ignore the expectations of greatness, and focus on your eyes and your fingers.
And, when all else fails, feel free to blame your muse. Just beware of the brick she’ll throw back.
Seriously, when your muse deserts you like this, hit her with a rock.
Blink. A rock? How can I advocate hitting an imaginary goddess of inspiration with a rock?
It’s simple. When a story stalls, that’s your invitation to write whatever comes to mind. You can begin with the most outlandish words you can think of. For example: “Muse, dear, I’m mad at you. I need a good story. Why aren’t you helping me? I’m throwing a brick your way.”
It sounds like a twisted form of on-the-couch therapy, but the key to this technique is that you write as you do it. Writer’s block is so harmful because it stops your desire to write. It halts the pen with thoughts of inadequacy. Hitting your muse with a rock is not the way to start the Great American Novel. What I’m advocating is a way to break that writer’s block. This probably won’t produce words you can use, and anyone looking over your shoulder might wonder at your sanity when the muse writes back with “Oh yeah? A rock? Is that the best you’ve got, writer-boy?” But this technique will get you writing. It will get thoughts from your mind onto the page, reopening the all-important path between eyes and pen.
This technique is actually a modified version of freewriting. Most writers use freewriting entirely off-the-manuscript. They find a fresh scrap of paper, scribble away for fifteen minutes or so to get in the head of their protagonist, and then they return to their typing. Hitting the muse with a rock requires no such interruption. As you sit before the precious manuscript with nothing to say, you duke it out with your muse right there. You type it onto your manuscript wherever it is you happen to be. Sure, the muse holds no real part in the story, but it relieves a lot of stress to throw rocks on paper. It loosens up the manuscript itself. Remember that writer’s block is the result of high expectation for the manuscript coupled with low expectations of your own abilities. Both of these impulses are wrong. A manuscript is never all-important – when you’re still at the stage for writer’s block, you’re sitting before a first or maybe a second draft. The story isn’t done yet. There’s plenty of room for change. Throw some bricks – you can always delete them later. A press of a key or a swipe of the pen restores the original work.
The secret, of course, is that you don’t need to throw bricks. You don’t need to involve your muse. As you develop this technique, you can focus it to meet the needs of your story. I discovered how much fun this can be during National Novel Writing Month, that wild month of the 50,000 word novel. For NaNoWriMo, the only requirement is word count, but getting that word count is hard. A week of writer’s block can be a deathblow to your work. To produce 1,667 words a day during the month of Thanksgiving and Christmas Shopping, every moment counts. You have to be focused and you have to be excited. The fingers must fly. So I began throwing rocks at my protagonists. Rocks, dragons, tanks, even a computer that was allergic to water. I tossed in absurd challenges, ideas that I would have never written had I taken the time to worry about the final product.
Strangely, the story I wrote worked. The protagonists fought back. Parts of the work seemed silly and ridiculous, I kept writing. The audacity of the story kept me in my seat – I never knew what would happen next, but I always knew I could find another rock.
There’s a reason why this technique works. Deep down, every story is about conflict. It’s about a protagonist facing a challenge and learning to overcome. Challenge on the page takes many forms, but you can imagine it as throwing a rock. Remember that your rock can represent any difficulty. It can be the prom dress that doesn’t fit. It can be the spooky neighbor who invites your protagonist to see the windowless basement after dinner. It can be the cute crush who’s too nice and too funny and to perfect for your protagonist to bear thinking about.
How does your protagonist respond to the rock? Does she duck aside, find her own rock, and throw it back at you? Or does she catch it in the stomach and throw up? Don’t think about it – write it. The key to this technique is to write every step of the way. Keep it fun. Pick an unusual rock, something that does not fit with the rest of your story. Has the heroic knight of the quantum order defeated the horrible space dragon? Give him the queen’s baby nephew to keep quiet for an hour. Has your heroine survived budget cuts and layoffs to become the executive vice president? Maybe her boss the vampire invites her to a round of midnight golf.
Remember, the goal here is not to write the Great American Novel. The goal is to break through writer’s block and to keep writing, to get the ideas free-flowing. Sometimes, you may discover an entertaining twist that you enjoy more than the original story. Other times, you’ll get a good laugh, reconnect with your characters, and then pick up from where you left off. The hardest part is letting go. You have to relax, ignore the expectations of greatness, and focus on your eyes and your fingers.
And, when all else fails, feel free to blame your muse. Just beware of the brick she’ll throw back.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Journal Your Inner Character
For fiction writers, the journal is a complicated subject. Moments spent documenting one's own life can be viewed as a selfish joy, a way of procrastinating on "serious" work for publication. It can also serve as a portal to the inner self, a way of examining the human experience. From established authors, I have heard both sides. I once knew a poet who felt that spending hours and hours on a journal was a waste of time. Another author once wrote that journaling detracted from the creative energy she needed for her fiction. On the flip side, a very literary couple I know keeps dream journals. They write down all they can remember from their dreams. They've said that at first, it's hard to remember much, but the more you access these memories and write them down the more accessible they become. It's as if you can train the mind to remember those elusive thoughts which are normally relegated to the dustbin of waking.
I'm afraid I've never tried a dream journal, and the journals that I have kept of life have never been as regular or as thorough as I would like. Before I took writing seriously, journaling was an occasional aside to myself, usually a way to gripe on paper about the girls (or lack of girls) in my life. As I became a better student of writing, it annoyed me that my journal entries were so vacuous. Occasionally I made attempts to go "in-depth" with a particular subject - a family concern, for instance, or a memory that I very much wanted to cherish dozens of years in the future.
Unfortunately, desire plays a strange game with motivation. Generally, I've found that a truly vivid memory tends to burn itself into my consciousness, and the "lesser" memories tend to drift under the surface of my waking thoughts. This sounds normal enough, at least until I go back and read the journal entries. A particularly telling article was an essay I once for the one journalism class I took. "Why I Write," it was titled - even now, I can't remember having written it. I can tell it must have been late at night, though, and under a deadline - it has the sound and feel of a journal entry. The entire article revolves around the girl I "loved" at the time, a friend of mine who lived five states away and who I mostly knew through e-mail. "Why I Write," it was titled, as if her distance and our e-mails would be enough to explain why I put fingers to keyboard every day. But reading this essay again last week, I discovered a depth of feeling that I had forgotten regarding this friend. It's been years now since she and I last talked or e-mailed - we barely knew each other. But for a few months my junior year, she was the headline of my life, the front-page story of the day, the reason I looked forward to waking up and the reason I never wanted to go to sleep.
Am I proud of my journal entries? Not particularly. Are they honest? Sure. Do they reveal the inner depths of my character? Most days I hope not. But these brief records of life - of my personal life - reveal the richness of the human experience. They rest like slow-release time capsules, waiting for those brief moments when I have a chance to leaf through and read about the person I once was, the person I've always been. The details are always so mundane that I forgot them, but they were pivotal enough to write.
So now, as I contemplate another night of typing fiction or typing a journal entry, I have to reflect on what journal entries have actually done for my writing. I like to think that I am a creative writer, that the thoughts I put on the page are unique and uniquely mine. But the source of these thoughts is unclear. Are they subconscious meanderings, the deep waves hidden far beneath the surface? Or are they the steady breeze of the ocean air sending laughter like ripples across the bay? I have my guesses, and so do the psychologists, but no one truly knows the source of great writing. No one can bottle it, there is no formula, and selling your soul works only until the director calls "cut!"
So when you reach a point in your fiction writing that you cannot write more, a moment when you don’t know what your protagonist should do or think, it might be time for a journal entry. The words might not seem important, and you might never share them, but those words are your life. They are the front-page story of your day. And if you want to write stirring fiction, the kind of work that truly explores that hidden continent the human mind, then what better foreign correspondent will you find than your journal?
I'm afraid I've never tried a dream journal, and the journals that I have kept of life have never been as regular or as thorough as I would like. Before I took writing seriously, journaling was an occasional aside to myself, usually a way to gripe on paper about the girls (or lack of girls) in my life. As I became a better student of writing, it annoyed me that my journal entries were so vacuous. Occasionally I made attempts to go "in-depth" with a particular subject - a family concern, for instance, or a memory that I very much wanted to cherish dozens of years in the future.
Unfortunately, desire plays a strange game with motivation. Generally, I've found that a truly vivid memory tends to burn itself into my consciousness, and the "lesser" memories tend to drift under the surface of my waking thoughts. This sounds normal enough, at least until I go back and read the journal entries. A particularly telling article was an essay I once for the one journalism class I took. "Why I Write," it was titled - even now, I can't remember having written it. I can tell it must have been late at night, though, and under a deadline - it has the sound and feel of a journal entry. The entire article revolves around the girl I "loved" at the time, a friend of mine who lived five states away and who I mostly knew through e-mail. "Why I Write," it was titled, as if her distance and our e-mails would be enough to explain why I put fingers to keyboard every day. But reading this essay again last week, I discovered a depth of feeling that I had forgotten regarding this friend. It's been years now since she and I last talked or e-mailed - we barely knew each other. But for a few months my junior year, she was the headline of my life, the front-page story of the day, the reason I looked forward to waking up and the reason I never wanted to go to sleep.
Am I proud of my journal entries? Not particularly. Are they honest? Sure. Do they reveal the inner depths of my character? Most days I hope not. But these brief records of life - of my personal life - reveal the richness of the human experience. They rest like slow-release time capsules, waiting for those brief moments when I have a chance to leaf through and read about the person I once was, the person I've always been. The details are always so mundane that I forgot them, but they were pivotal enough to write.
So now, as I contemplate another night of typing fiction or typing a journal entry, I have to reflect on what journal entries have actually done for my writing. I like to think that I am a creative writer, that the thoughts I put on the page are unique and uniquely mine. But the source of these thoughts is unclear. Are they subconscious meanderings, the deep waves hidden far beneath the surface? Or are they the steady breeze of the ocean air sending laughter like ripples across the bay? I have my guesses, and so do the psychologists, but no one truly knows the source of great writing. No one can bottle it, there is no formula, and selling your soul works only until the director calls "cut!"
So when you reach a point in your fiction writing that you cannot write more, a moment when you don’t know what your protagonist should do or think, it might be time for a journal entry. The words might not seem important, and you might never share them, but those words are your life. They are the front-page story of your day. And if you want to write stirring fiction, the kind of work that truly explores that hidden continent the human mind, then what better foreign correspondent will you find than your journal?
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Learn to Write Creatively
I saw a question online about how to start creative writing. It's a very good question, but even many writers fail to take it seriously. I think this is because most non-writers fail to accept the short answer - writers must write. Usually they must write a lot. So when someone comes up and asks how to start creative writing, many writers lack the patience to really explain where to begin.
The best way to start creative writing is to find a piece of paper or a napkin and start jotting down whatever comes to mind. If you have a specific story you want to write, start writing down what it's about. If you hear a snippet of dialogue in your mind, or you see something special about your main character, definitely write that. Anything you think of can become a valuable part of your story.
Next, start writing your story. If you're on a roll, just keep going on the same piece of paper. Write for as long as you can - if you only have five minutes at lunch, that's enough to get started. As long as you come back - even if only for a few minutes each day - you can keep building the story. Making a daily habit of writing will stimulate your imagination and help you take your story in new directions. Don't wait for inspiration - often, inspiration strikes when you least expect it, and the best way to find more is to put pencil to paper and to keep going until you get there.
Later, when you've finished your story, I recommend finding someone to share your story with. A parent, a friend, someone to give supportive advice. When you feel like you want to get more specific feedback on your stories, find a local writers' group or sign up for an online workshop. Fellow writers can provide helpful advice for how to improve your writing while also encouraging you to keep going.
The most important thing, though, is to keep writing. Even on days when you don't like what you've written or someone else doesn't like it, write some more. Every day is a new chance to develop your creative voice.
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