Creative Writing Corner

Allow Time for Reflection

If you have deadlines for stories like I do, sometimes you have to get started with the writing before you feel quite ready. I like to think of an idea and then put it on the backburner in my brain for a while, letting it stew, and when it comes to the foreground again in time, I'm ready to write a strong first draft. Much of this thinking is not even done consciously, but allowing time for an idea to grow not on the page makes it stronger, I think.

It's unfortunate when I feel rushed and have to start writing even though there hasn't been enough time to think about this idea. I'm currently in that situation; I should be handing in work soon, so yesterday I reluctantly started on a story that clearly isn't ready to see the light of day. I felt myself mentally dragging my feet with every word, which doesn't lend itself to the most graceful and sinuous prose. While it's good to get back into the swing of things, I really think this story could benefit from more cogitating time.

When you get your next story idea, you might consider a similar thing. While it's true that it can be good to strike while the iron is hot, I'm a strong supporter of the "step away" method. That doesn't mean I think you should plan out everything beforehand, or be taking copious notes and drawing diagrams. Instead, I think you should just know that that idea is in the back of your mind. As you go about your day, think about if what you are experiencing now would enrich your story idea if you added it in. Consider something you see on the street: would that be an interesting image to include? Details like this will make your first real writing effort much more vibrant and also more coherent, because you're bringing the experience of a real person (yourself) to an abstract idea.

What's Something Worth Fighting For?

In another post on my unofficial series about getting to know your characters, I want you to consider what your character considers worth fighting for. Just as knowing a person's fears and dreams are important to getting insight into his/her personality, it's also important to know what drives them. We may feel very middling about a lot of things in our lives, but there are some things we can't help feeling passionate about. Whether it's a political issue, a human right, a friend or lover, or just a hobby, just about everyone has something they are willing to risk everything to fight for.

So this week, try thinking about what your character would place above all else in his life -- what would be the final straw. What really really makes him angry? What would he fight to protect or dismantle? By knowing your character's drive and ambition well, you will give your story a sense of greater direction because your character will have direction. Make this issue something that works as the engine of the story, and make your character risk everything to fight for what he's passionate about.

How To Use Small Things to Express Big Emotion

I vividly remember a writing class I attended when I was fourteen or fifteen, when a visiting writing teacher gave us a haunting walkthrough of a moment in Toni Morrison's novel Sula. In this emotionally weighty moment, one of the larger climaxes in the book, a woman walks in on her husband having an affair with another woman. She is standing in the doorway, taking in the scene in just a moment, and Morrison does not linger on the tumultuous emotions and grand ideas sure to be surging through the scene. She does not give us a treatise on betrayal or discuss the theory of the marriage contract or of love. She does not even say outright what heavy emotions people are feeling. Instead, she uses a marvelous technique: she focuses on the little things.

In this moment, staring at the bed with the lovers, the woman does not say that she feels sadness or shock. Instead, she can't stop staring at her own bedsheets, and feeling slightly ashamed that they might be dirty. Then she looks at her husband's tie hanging on the bedpost. She can't stop remembering how she tied it this morning for him, and how sad and ragged it looks there on the bedpost. Everything in the narrative spirals in more and more narrowly, with the tie at the center of an unspoken whirlpool of sadness and loss.

It's a masterful bit of storytelling, and it's a technique we can apply to our own writing. At a moment of heightened emotion in your writing, whether it's the climax or a moment to grab the reader in the beginning or anywhere else, try to be thoughtful about the real way we deal with painful emotion. We don't announce to ourselves, "This is the worst thing ever! I feel wrecked with grief!" Rather, we try to dodge around it, avoid it, push it aside. We focus on small, concrete things that symbolize our grief or make it more palatable to our minds. We can only think about grief through a lens in this way, at least while the feeling is still raw.

So when you're writing that emotionally weighty scene, try Toni Morrison's technique and focus in on something that seems to capture and embody the feelings of the moment. Don't make it overly symbolic -- it's been done, say, to have someone contemplating a skull when a death has occurred -- but rather, pick a small and ordinary object or event. Pour your character's emotion and attention into it, and it will come to life, standing in for all the grief that cannot be said.

Don't Wait for Someone Else's Approval

Because of a few scheduling conflicts lately, I haven't been able to be having my stories workshopped in class for a while now. For the first few weeks, I basically stopped writing, waiting for this workshopping. I felt like I couldn't continue writing until I had received the official go-ahead from a professor, the approval of a superior. In reality, though, we shouldn't wait for someone else's approval to get started with writing.

This message applies to a lot of budding writers in a lot of different walks of life, I think. There are the young teens out there, wanting to try their hand at poetry, but afraid to disappoint their parents if they're not going to science camp. There are the college students holding off on majoring in creative writing because it's not a major that will be the most financially viable. There are the middle-aged folks trying something new and hearing spouses or friends laughing at picking up this hobby so late in life.

Whether you're good or bad, though, I do think that if you feel the urge to write, there's no one person or authority or financial worry that should hold you back from writing. Don't wait for someone to approve your endeavor -- just begin! Beginnings are so powerful -- you'll be full of energy and purpose and potential. Your writing will be rough at first, and there are plenty of reasons to be afraid of failure, but none of these fears should be reason enough to stop you. Be bold, and write boldly. Even if there are people who tell you wait until next year, or to put it off until school is over or the kids are out of the house -- don't wait. Make time and satisfy your impulse.

Have I impressed upon you the urgency of this endeavor? Because now is the perfect time to begin.

5 Reasons to Stop Writing RIGHT NOW

Sometimes we've just been spending too much time staring at our computer screens. Sometimes we'll just end up beating our heads against a wall if we keep trying to get a problematic story. Sometimes we need to stop writing in order to get our heads on straight and think creatively. Here are a few ways to stop writing, and reasons why you should do so.

Go out and take a walk.

These days, people spend entirely too much time cooped up inside. At least, I know I do. For my work, I sit in a windowless interior room with humming florescent lights for five hours a day. For my internship, I'm in another (almost) windowless warehouse room. And while writing in my apartment, there are only two small windows, neither of which are near my desk. I need light and fresh air and stimulation and something far away to focus my eyes on, and I'm betting you do too. Go for a walk like I did yesterday, and experience the wind whipping against your face! You'll remember what it feels like to experience spring after a long winter.

Get some exercise

My writing is always best when I've had an active day and have gotten my heart rate up for a little while. It gets you feeling energized and full of gumption, ready to think of new ideas and try writing whole new scenes instead of just changing words around in already existing ones. To get a big boost in energy and adrenaline, try incorporating a little more exercise into your routine.

After the jump: more reasons to stop writing RIGHT NOW!

Use a Phone Conversation in Your Fiction

Because they deal in images, movies can become repetitive and stereotyped so easily that filmmakers are constantly having to innovate, changing up their images and scene patterns so that they feel new. One example of this innovation is the rise of the phone conversation in a movie. Movies have a long tradition of having people talking on phones; it's a great way to convey distance and yet have characters talking together. It makes things seem more mysterious and romantic. And it's a technique we writers would do well to try out.

A phone conversation is a great way to get two characters talking who might otherwise not have spoken. While it's not realistic to have everyone willing to meet face to face, most characters are willing to have a chat on the phone. And what's more, because they're not face to face, many people are willing to say on the phone what they wouldn't dare in person. People can say outright what would sound too talky in another type of scene.

There's another good thing about phone conversations in fiction: they inherently have a good way to end the scene. When the scene needs to end, all you need to do is hang up.

So why not try a phone conversation in your fiction? Just like moviemakers, we writers keep having to vary our scenes, to make them happen in different ways and at different times and with different voices. If every scene in a story is the same thing again and again -- a meeting at someone's house, dinner in a cafe, a walk in the park -- then the scenes will start to seem stale and redundant. A phone conversation will change the dynamic and give your characters a chance to interact in a different way, with different rules and obligations. It might just free you up to write a scene the way it should be written for maximum impact.

Decide Who Your Audience Is

In the college class I T.A. for, I heard the teacher tell his students that they must know who the audience is for their papers. If they're writing about dancing, for example, they must decide whether their reader is an insider in the dancing world or doesn't know a thing. They must write with this reader in mind. While the professor was talking about writing analytical papers, it's absolutely true for fiction as well.

When you are working on a new story, ask yourself who your audience is. Is the reader you imagine an insider? If so, you will be writing with a lot of the lingo of the world without explanation. If he is an outsider, you will need to explain things. As you can see, your imagined audience changes your voice and style. Is your reader old or young? With you, or against you?

An example of a novel whose style depends heavily on the imagined audience is Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita. The book begins with our narrator in jail for murder and child molestation. The entire novel unfolds as his planned address to an unknown jury, attempting to justify his actions. Without that imagined jury, the scope and style of the book wouldn't make sense or have this added imperative. The choice of your audience can similarly change the direction of your book.

An added benefit of having a firm audience in mind is that it will make you write at your best. Sometimes I picture an empty space, something like a lecture hall or church. I am the only one speaking today, and my speech is not yet prepared. When I step up to the podium, there is only one figure in the audience, watching with rapt attention. Sometimes the vision becomes more elaborate; I imagine that he or she has come a long way to see me, and has endured hardship. He or she has come to this city, this building, only to hear me.

Who is that person? I'm not sure, but holding that person in my mind makes me write with greater urgency. I've got to make it count; I've got to make his journey worthwhile. I'm on a mission to communicate, to reach that one person, to make him or her understand what I'm about and why I write, why my story is worth it.

Look Through Your Own Blog's Archives

In the past I've encouraged readers to look through their old stories. It's encouraging to see both where we came from and how far we've come since then. But I also want to encourage a stroll through your blog's archives, for some very different reasons.

1. You'll see how your blogging skills developed.

In case you're curious, this blog first began as a slightly gushy teen writing enthusiast's spot to put her ramblings. Here is my very first post, now seven years old:

This is the grand opening of the Creative Writing Corner! I know there are thousands of teen writers out there just burning to get their thoughts out. I'm hoping some of you will email me with short story submissions, and I'll put the best of them on this site!

And that was it. I didn't know yet how to develop a thought into a long post, or how to stay on message. I didn't know how to structure a post or even what people were looking for in a blog. But I'd like to think I've come a long way since then.

2. You'll see what concerned you in the past.

It's interesting to see what things held your attention in past years. Were you worried about improving your dialogue? Strengthening your diction? Did you have a personal or a spiritual problem that needed working out? Sometimes once we've solved our problems, we forget we ever had them, but a blog acts as a record of what we were thinking about at a certain point in time.

3. You'll get ideas on what to write about.

One possible effect of reading over your old posts is that you'll see gaps, holes in topics that you meant to talk about and never got to. You may find a post that promises you'll write about such-and-such next week -- but you never did. I'm guilty of that a few times, particularly in the older posts, and it gives me a chance to finally write up that idea I had ages ago and then lost.

How to Make a Character "Normal"

We often begin imagining a character for a story by thinking about the Big Stuff. In the middle of the night, you're struck with an idea: you want to write a story about a character whose parents are both in prison. A character with a deathly fear of microwaves. A character whose greatest love just died in a plane crash. All of these things are the extreme aspects of a person's life. They give us the drama and the pathos, which are pretty crucial to a moving story. What is also crucial, however, and what often gets overlooked, are the things that make a character normal.

By normal, I mean a person who's like us, who is stumbling (or gliding) through life with the same small facts of existence that we deal with everyday. It's important to remember that your character goes to the bathroom, gets colds, occasionally hiccups and feels annoyed when that dumb commercial comes on the television. To make your character sympathetic through the big stuff, we've got to believe he or she also lives with the small stuff.

So what are some ways to make your character a human being and not a god or a demon? I'd like to outline a few tips that might make your overly archetypal character feel normal again.

1. Give us the realities of the body.

An incomplete character often seems to hover like a wraith above the pages: he does not walk on the earth or breathe its air. To make your character feel more human, make sure the realities of his or her body are present. Remind us that muscles ache, that breathing can feel wheezing and labored, that burps and hiccups do happen.

After the jump: more ways to make your character normal.

Using Assonance in Your Stories

Sometimes we get so focused on the macro side of writing -- plotlines, character arcs, and so on -- that we forget to pay attention to the micro side of it. A well-written story not only has a good overall experience, but also has a sweet musicality to it, a beauty from line to line. You have to use your best diction, word choice, and rhythm to get that smooth ride. Today I want to suggest a technique that when used sparingly can really improve the sound of your words: assonance.

Assonance is alliteration's lesser-known cousin. Dust off your high school English texts: you remember that alliteration is when two words in sequence begin with the same sound, such as "huge hippo" or "sputtering sprinkler." Assonance, on the other hand, is a far subtler and more pleasing game of words. It's when two words share the same vowel sound. While poets generally shun alliteration as sounding contrived and childish, assonance is something makes a sentence sound harmonious and purposeful in both poetry and prose.

I was reminded of this recently with a simple phrase in an Alice Munro story which continues to hold my attention weeks after reading it. In a dressmaker's shop, Munro writes that the dressmaker gives the cloth a "wicked snip" with her scissors. "Wicked snip" works on many different levels. It deliciously captures the sharp slicing sound of the scissors; it gives us just the right level of tension in the scene with the word "wicked"; and it sounds pleasing and memorable for the ear because of that assonance.

Here are a few more word pairs that you may see appearing in books purely because the words sound good together:

Snap back
long pall
fierce need
poor lord
neat, even

These word pairs might not mean much on their own, but they're coming out of the starting blocks with a distinct advantage: euphony, or the quality of being pleasing to the ear. Work on your own assonance pairs. They can be overused and begin to seem forced the way rhyming poetry can, but if sprinkled lightly through a story, they will make a reader trust your writing skill far more.