Creative Writing Corner

Find the Joyful Side of Creativity!

With all the talk about getting published, about the hard work, the right pens, the little technicalities, and all the other sometimes painful details of writing, we can sometimes forget about the joy of writing. Creativity in general is 99% perspiration, like what Einstein said about genius, but it's nothing without that occasional flash of joy and elation at the power of making something new and wholly your own.

I was reminded of the joie de vivre of creativity recently when I saw Pixar's latest gem of a movie, Up. There is a touching amount of humanity in this story, and every character has a compelling story and personality. Besides that, though, there is a sense of sheer inventive delight in every frame. The explosion of whimsical color as a mountain of balloons climb into the sky, pulling a house with it; the gymnastic feats of a giant, fantastical bird as it tears through the jungle; and the little, telling details, such as the quiet, loving relationship between the main character and his wife, are all beautiful expressions of the power of writing and imagery to express reality and fantasy. It seems at times that the artists of Pixar are creating for the sheer joy of surprising and delighting audiences. At the same time, the movie is thoughtful enough about the human condition to bring a tear to your eye.

It's this kind of harmonious blend that can remind us about the joy of creating works of art. Stories at their best can be engrossing, terrifying, captivating, and delightful! Take a little time out every now and then to remind yourself of why you love to write in the first place.

Currently Reading: Sister Carrie

  Image from Amazon.

I decided to go back to my old list of the best 100 novels of the 20th century according to a handful of professors, so I'm currently reading Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. This book just barely makes it onto the list, having been written in 1900, and it does feel very quaint and Victorian at times. However, there are a few interesting touches that make it intriguingly modern.

For one thing, this is a thoroughly urban text, rather than being about the country or small towns. It's about Chicago beginning to boom, rise, and rival New York in its glamor and cultural offerings. Also, the treatment of sexuality and acceptable social mores have changed dramatically from the Dickensian tales of a few short decades earlier. Our main character, Carrie, is a "kept woman" of sorts, being paid to live in an apartment and entertain herself, while being the unmarried "companion" of a man who fancies her. The sense of nineteenth-century modesty is still present in that Dreiser never makes it clear whether the couple is having sex or not. Similarly, when Carrie meets another man later on, it hasn't been made clear whether they have an affair or not. It's frustrating at times that this old-fashioned novel won't divulge exactly what is happening in the relationships, and we are left guessing.

Although that's a minus for the novel, I'm still enjoying it a lot because the story and characters are interesting and the writing is lovely. I have yet to discover if Dreiser will stop writing in such a secretive way.

Buzz: Writebite

For those of you interested in an online writing opportunity with a different slant, take a look at WriteBite. It's a site specializing in strongly opinionated pieces -- or as it admits freely on the site, rants. If you have a bone to pick about some issue and you want to write passionately about it, consider submitting an essay to WriteBite. Best yet, the site promises some payments for the strongest pieces. So you might even get something off your chest and get paid for it.

If you've got a writing site or lead that you think the readers of Creative Writing Corner will benefit from hearing about, email me and I'll check it out. If the site seems interesting, you'll see it appear here in the buzz section.

Have More ____ Characters in Your Story

We all have habits that we cling to in our everyday routines. We might brush our teeth a certain way or always put the left sock on before the right. We might have a nightly ritual of checking certain sites or watching television shows. In the same way, we tend to fall into ruts in our creative lives. We develop habits of what kind of stories we should write and who should populate them. This is especially true with regard to the characters that are similar to ourselves; if you're me, you might find a lot of college-aged white female New Englanders filling your stories.

So this week, try looking back at your stories and figuring out what they're lacking. What sort of characters have been under-represented? What races, genders, classes or professions of people have you been neglecting to write about? Try filling in the blank in this post's title with whatever kind of people you've been missing out on. It doesn't have to be some sort of a demographic; it could be "have more imaginative characters in your story" or "have more emotional characters." Whatever it is, try shaking it up in your next story and incorporating a type of person you normally shy away from.

Language Barriers

The language barriers that exist throughout the world and even around our own homes can be frustrating and can throw up huge obstacles toward understanding. There's also no lonelier feeling than being surrounded by people who don't speak your language; you can travel to a new place and easily find yourself without a hope of being understood by anyone you meet. The arrogance of some tourists, who expect others to speak their language, usually doesn't help the isolation and disconnection that can come from different languages.

I think all this is very fertile ground to be explored in fiction, and I've taken a stab at it recently. A story that ended up in my creative senior thesis, whose working title was "Language Barrier", was about a young woman in love with a man whose first language is French. Though his English is excellent, the girl feels isolated by a part of his life that she will always be excluded from -- his French family and childhood, the language he thinks and dreams in first, the language he will most probably teach their children so that she will be an outsider in the family unless she learns it.

Language really can be a significant barrier to understanding among people, but it doesn't have to be an un-crossable one. My main character attempts to find some way to find insight into her lover, and eventually manages to see some deeper sides of him that don't require language. They are isolated from each other at first, but through a few trials, learn to communicate. It may prove inspiring to you to think about language as a potential story catalyst. Who speaks different languages in your story, and who is unable to communicate with whom? What does it mean about the potential for very different characters to connect?

Revisit an Old, Failed Story

If you've been writing for a while, chances are you have the kind of folder I have on my computer, one labelled simply "Rejects." That is the folder where stories go to die. If a story flagged or didn't have a compelling enough main character or didn't seem to make sense, or just became uninteresting to me, I put them here -- I can't quite bear to delete them, but they're failures.

This week, though, try looking at your old, failed stories in a new light. It may have been years since you last looked at the piece, and now you are in a different place mentally and creatively. You have improved your writing skills; perhaps now you can faithfully depict that scene that you thought you could never write. Maybe you've learned a few more things about human behavior and you now know how a character would act in a perplexing situation. The point is, you change all the time, and a story that was "unsustainable" in the past might be viable now. Why not give it a chance?

To breathe life into an old story, first give it a quick read-through to refresh yourself of what you've got so far. Then ask yourself a few questions, and jot down notes for the answers:

Who is the main character?

What change will the character undergo in the story

What is the climactic scene?

How do you want the story to end?

If you find yourself coming up with new answers to these questions, then there's hope that this story is ready to be revived. Try adding a few scenes. It'll be slow at first and tough to get back into that particular story's world and frame of mind, but you'll get the hang of it, and you just might get a first-rate story out of it.

July 4th: What Does Independence Mean to You?

Happy Independence Day to the Americans reading Creative Writing Corner! It's a good holiday, but as always, it's a good time to start asking yourself some questions about what the day means and what independence as a concept really means. For women in particular, I think, independence can be a daily struggle that takes both imagination and compromise. Virginia Woolf made independence a concept that is now seen as crucial to the writing life: without self-reliance, we cannot be truly creatively bold, she argued, and the women of her time particularly needed this in order to take wing. Independence can be a state of mind, but it can also be very concrete, such as the "room of one's own" and the 500 pounds a year that Woolf set as a standard for independence. We may need significantly more than that amount, but financial independence is just as crucial today as it was then.

Perhaps in your life, financial independence is proving an obstacle toward embracing the writing life, but perhaps there's a need for greater emotional independence as well. Are there people or other emotional ties in your life that are holding you back? This time of year might be a good time to evaluate your life and consider what ties need to be cut and which ones re-negotiated.

Of course, I'm not a believer in absolute and total independence, the kind that denies any attachment to the world, to a community, to a family or country. A more mature outlook on life, I think, is one in which we acknowledge all of our mutual interdependence while not being afraid to strike out on our own and take wing. A country and an individual alike must acknowledge that they are not islands. But find your own way to be creative, and have a wonderful holiday this year!

Buzz: The Basilica Review

Looking for a place to try sending your work? I've just received word about a new literary magazine called The Basilica Review. It's an elegant-looking publication that will have short fiction and poetry. Of course, there's no reading fee and all submissions are in fact read (which is more than can be said for some of the bigger publications).

So if you're just starting out and want a nice-looking publication on your resume, try sending some work to The Basilica Review. They're looking for strong voices of all types.

Is Memory Identity?

I've read a lot of interesting articles, often by the famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, about memory and how wrapped up it is with identity. In particular, Sacks' tales of extreme amnesiacs, those who have lost all ability to make new memories, are harrowing stories about becoming unmoored in one's own sense of self. I've written a story about this; in my short story, a woman's progressive Alzheimer's disease causes her to move back in time in her life, losing the events that defined her later years.

The questions raised by such stories are whether memory constitutes identity, or whether there is something else, something residual, that makes up our self-image. The interesting thing Sacks observed was that while the patients were sometimes confused and disoriented, they often had one thing or person in their lives that kept them whole, able to maintain a sense of personality and self. Clive, the accomplished musician who lost all ability to maintain short-term memories, was held together through his knowledge of music. While he couldn't remember people or places or books for longer than a few seconds, he was able to play long piano pieces without difficulty. Other patients were kept whole through their devotion to a partner. No matter how much time had passed since a visit from a loved one, the patients remembered and were made calm and happy by the loved one's appearance.

After the jump: how do you write about memory?

What Does a Writer Look Like?

  Image from Goshen School NY.

Just like other professions, writers have a certain stereotyped look about them that many writers ascribe to look like. While for the men, a Hemingway-esque beard may be essential, what I'm really talking about is clothing. Writers in movies, for example, are always dressed in a particular way. I'm talking about the glasses, the corduroy blazer with elbow patches, the slightly rumpled but still classy collared shirt. It's a look that must be cultivated carefully to project an aura of the professor with an added, slightly rumpled bohemian glamor.

With that in mind, I admit I've succumbed to a few temptations in my time to look a little more writerly with regard to my wardrobe. I went for a burgundy corduroy blazer which I love and have worn to many a reading, from, surprisingly enough, Victoria's Secret, which you can find here. I'm a little off of mini skirts and have instead cultivated an interested in pencil skirts because of their tailored, professional look. Pencil skirts are the sort of thing, I imagine, to be worn in the offices of a chic literary magazine, and I wore them most days during my internship in such a place last year. I also feel a small twinge of regret that next year I will probably be getting laser surgery for my eyes and will once and for all forgo the glasses I wear occasionally (I usually wear contacts). Glasses seem like a very writerly touch and I will be sad to lose them. However, I can rest assured that in thirty or so years, like everyone else, I will once again need reading glasses.

How Important is It to Be Paid for Your Writing?

When you are justing starting out on a writerly path, beginning to call yourself a writer, it's important to establish what it means to you to be a writer and what your kind of success is. Many people out there will tell you that you're not a writer until you've completed a novel; others will say you're not a writer until you've had a story published somewhere; still others will tell you you're not a writer until your novel has been published. Don't listen to them! Being a writer is about what you make it out to be, and you should try asking yourself a few questions.

What are my standards of writing that make me a writer?
There's a certain quality of writing that, I believe, is necessary before someone can fully be satisfied by calling him or herself a writer. At the same time, only you can tell yourself when you're proud of the writing you're producing. When starting out, set yourself a goal to read your own work and evaluate it critically. When you're satisfied that you're really writing at the level of work you yourself would want to read, then you can be confident that you're a writer.

After the jump: what about being paid, and is the writing or the salary more important?

Photographs in the Digital Age

I remember the days when my mother used to gather the family around for a show of the best photos from her and my father's days living in France. The photos were collected either on slides, which required getting out the old Kodak carousel and wrestling a collapsible screen into position, or they were pasted into fat photo books that took two people's laps to hold as we pored over every page. Back then, photos were special and often few; we might get only a handful of successful shots from a shaky camera, and a stack of blurry or poorly lit ones that were useless. That made the one photo of the cliff in the Dordogne where everything looked perfect all the more precious.

Nowadays, the digital age has completely changed what photographs mean and how they operate in our lives. We are inundated by images at all times, and we ourselves, with digital cameras, have the power to take hundreds of quality shots, tossing out or touching up any bad ones. It has made the quality of photos go up dramatically; but it has made the tactile experience of viewing photos go up in the air.

After the jump: what has the digital age done for the way we think about photographs?

Off to Paris!

  Image from Awakenings with Coffee.

For the next two weeks, I'll be jetting off to Paris with my boyfriend. As our treat for ourselves as graduates, we've spent our money on tickets to France and we'll be happily bopping around the city. As my regular readers know, I'm no stranger to the city, thanks to my parents' jobs as wine importers. My boyfriend, however, has never visited the city of lights, so I'll have the task of showing him the best sights and limping along in my best French. It's sure to be a great adventure and I can't wait to be alone and independent in this beautiful city for the first time.

Of course, I haven't forgotten my loyal readers. I've been hard at work, writing posts about the writerly life for the Corner, and they'll be appearing every weekday and Sunday as usual. There will be thoughts on Independence Day, advice on reviving old stories, and thoughts on how to make your future writing fresher than your old work. Stay tuned, and Creative Writing Corner will serve all your creative writing needs!

Revising Your Stories for Publication, Part 2

In part one of this post, I began by writing about putting your own emotional attachment to a story aside in order to edit from the perspective of a stranger. There's something else to consider when revising your work for publication. You must make yourself a stranger, but you've also got to learn to put the story first.

Step Two: Putting the Story First
By evaluating your story as a stranger, you can make it smooth, polished, and competent. The problem with the readings that go on at literary magazines is, though, that the readers see and reject hundreds of merely competently-written stories every day. I know; I worked at one of the biggest literary magazines in the country, and had the job of reading and rejecting something like 60-100 stories every day. While some were laughably bad, most were competently written, but had nothing new, original, or startling to bring to the table.

After the jump: how to make your story stand out.

Photo of the Week

, originally uploaded by amaiak00.

This is an excellent shot to get you writing because of the amount of ambiguity and mystery concerned with what's happening in the shot. It's your choice to interpret this in a grim, cheerful, or other way.