Creative Writing Corner

What Do You Love About Halloween?

Happy Halloween, writers! I hope you're having a good time and are busily planning costumes, parties, and candy. I must say it's one of my favorite holidays, both for the sense of fun and the gorgeous fall foliage. In honor of the day, I'd like to direct you to the post I wrote a while back for a previous halloween about How to Write Horror. Enjoy, be safe, and don't let the zombies bite tonight!

Photo of the Week

Golden Gate Lights, originally uploaded by Wiggum03.

It's wonderful when a photograph or a piece of writing can make the familiar seem abruptly otherworldly and new. This gorgeous image of the golden gate bridge makes it seem like we're looking at a different planet or through the lens of a dream. Will it inspire you this week?

From the Archives

It's time for your regular tour through the archives. Take a look at a few posts from roughly one year ago:

Writing Exercise: Living Dangerously

The Need to Polish Your Stories

Creative Thesis, Entry 1

Leading Your Reader into a Labyrinth

A Quick Guide to Plagiarism

With the rise of internet has come a lot of marvelous things, from blogs like this (isn't it marvelous!) to the spread of easily accessible news and information. That great sharing of networking that makes the internet great, however, has also enabled a tremendous increase in plagiarism. As a writer, I can assure you that copying someone else's work is serious business, and it's incredibly hurtful to find something you sweated over somewhere else, under someone else's name. It's just plain disrespectful to the real work that went into creating the piece. So I'd like to clear up where I stand on a few gray areas of plagiarism, and give you a few tips on protecting yourself from plagiarism.

Lifting someone else's posts is plagiarism.
A common practice in the blog world these days, which I believe is called "scraping", is when someone will lift another blogger's rss feed and plunk it right down on his/her site without permission, attribution or even a link back to the original site. Let me be clear here: you're profiting from someone else's content and essentially pretending that this content is yours, even if you're not explicitly writing out, "I wrote this." Consider what this would be in the non-digital world: you copy and paste the entire text of Lorrie Moore's new novel and sell it. Yes, that would be illegal. So you can see how the same practice is wrong on the internet, right?

A blog post made up entirely of other's work, even with attribution, is plagiarism.
So you put the author's name at the bottom of the text you scraped. Whoop-de-doo for you. You're profiting from another author's content without his or her permission, basically claiming ownership for the text by having it as your content on your blog. Really, it's just laziness in this case; you want to have a blog, but you don't want to expend the effort to keep it up.

After the jump: ways to stay one jump ahead of the cheaters!

Can You Love Writing That is Morally Repugnant?

There are some writers who have such pure, unquestionable talent that you can't help falling in love with their prose. It doesn't matter if they're writing pages about dryer lint; the writing is so skillful, or so perfectly embodies something you wish you could do, that it doesn't matter what's being written about.

But what if the writing is on a morally questionable subject, or expresses a point of view that horrifies or disturbs you?

The question of separating aesthetics from morals has been circulating the literary world for decades, if not centuries. Is it possible, or preferable, to see beauty independent of its implications? Can anything morally repugnant ever be truly beautiful?

I came up against this problem with a few recent readings: first with Martin Amis' Success and then with some short stories of George Saunders. Both writers are, undeniably, bursting with raw talent. For years, they have wowed readers with their distinctive styles and writerly verve. I'd be perfectly happy to have the ease and delight with which these masters play with language.

After the jump: what's wrong with Amis and Saunders?

Photo of the Week

IC1396A The Elephant's Trunk Nebula, HaRGB, originally uploaded by write_adam.

To zoom out a little this week, take a look at this gorgeous image of the Elephant's Trunk nebula. Apparently there is a very bright star at the center of this mysterious formation of gas and dust. Pictures of the wonders of the universe always get me excited; what will it do for you?

Photo of the Week

nel frattempo..., originally uploaded by cavarica.

This week's photo is simple, but somehow thought-provoking. It gets me wondering about the setting around this lonely streetlamp. And who would be looking up at it with the perspective of this photograph? Think about it and try writing a little this week.

Feeling Overscheduled?

This past month or so, I've seen the glorious free time I had gradually begin to evaporate. First there were grad school classes taking up a handful of hours per week; then there was my regular part-time job, grabbing another five hours per weekday. Then a private tutoring job that will be taking another few hours a week. On top of that, there's piles of homework and writing projects on a regular basis. It's amazing how insidious our schedules can be, creeping up on us until we suddenly realize it's been a full week or more since we had time to ourselves to think, dream, and write.

Do you ever feel overscheduled? Most people do these days, and it can be a real killer to creativity. I'd like to turn this post over to you today, and ask my readers what you do to feel sane and creative when your day is full from dawn to dusk. Do you squeeze short moments of peace into breaks throughout the day? Do you work extra hard so that you can have a solid weekend day of free time? Do you schedule free time into your day, or hope it will come to you?

Ultimately, I do think being busy (within reason) is a good thing. It makes me feel both stimulated and useful, getting work done, making money or helping people, learning or teaching. All of these things contribute to my feeling of well-being and my ability to think creatively when the time comes.

How to Comment on Other People's Writing

Talking about someone else's writing can be tough, especially if that person is your friend. If you don't like the writing, or even if you do but think it needs a lot of work, how do you keep the conversation constructive? As a workshop veteran, I've learned a few ways to help a fellow student without seeming boorish or insensitive. So take a look at this list of five ways to comment helpfully on someone's writing. Feel free to add anything you've learned in the comments!

1. Find something positive.
The cardinal rule of commenting on and workshopping others' stories is to include both good news and bad news, and to start with the good. For a person who is nervous and defensive about their work, it's a way to ease them into the commenting process and reassure them that there is potential and talent in the work, even if in only a small part at the moment. So be thoughtful and dig up something that was done effectively or surprised you. Did the person describe things beautifully? Have sympathetic characters? Maintain a strong sense of suspense? Whatever it is, find it and begin with it.

2. Encourage growth in that direction.
All right, so as rough as the story may be, you've discovered a small strength. Rather than go on endlessly about how wrong wrong wrong another part is, try to emphasize that good thing and encourage expansion of it. Say his writing was very vivid in one scene, but fell flat everywhere else. Try saying or writing, "I really enjoyed this scene and thought your writing rose to a new level. I think you should try writing the other scenes in this style as well."

After the jump: three more ways to be respectful and helpful.

Photo of the Week

a life together, originally uploaded by miii_bazz.

I love the casual intimacy of this shot. There are plenty of characters to write about in it, too, not just the main couple. What would you write about the character who's looking at them?