Creative Writing Corner

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.

Photo of the Week

at the edge of porteau cove, originally uploaded by manyfires.

Enjoy this striking shot this week, and try and use it to inspire yourself!

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.

What Keeps You Up at Night?

This week, I want you to think about what thing, issue, or worry in your life has the power to keep you tossing and turning long into the night. Is it a relative who's in trouble? Financial woes? A moral quandary?

Whatever it is, it's clearly a powerful force in your life, and the perfect impetus for a story. Good stories are roiling with tension and unease. They keep you feeling anxious for the character, and they make you worried on his behalf. Whatever keeps you up at night is something that has the power to keep your reader worried too.

So is it not knowing about your future? Feeling guilty about something bad you did? Wishing you had gotten more done? Something that keeps you up at night can easily be altered to be a thing that keeps a new character up at night. It's a nagging worry that won't go away, something that can't just be solved with more thought. Stories need problems; too often stories are simply character sketches, showing portraits of people. It's the worries, though, that make it seem like time is really passing and there's a reason to turn the pages.

Maybe what keeps you up at night is worrying about your story! If so, even that is something that could turn into your next writing project.

Ask Yourself Why You Write

My new workshop professor this semester likes to start a discussion about a story with a few questions. Instead of immediately leaping into evaluative mode, we discuss instead what we thought the main point of the story is, why a particular voice was used, or what imperative made the writer write this story. It's helpful for a writer to hear what readers think the point of the piece is; it can tell him or her if they are completely off track, or even if the story is rough, if the purpose still shines through.

This is a good exercise to try applying to your own writing; you don't need a classful of students to do it for you. Once you've finished the rough draft of a story, take a moment before you revise and ask yourself why you wrote this story. Was there an idea or a truth you had to tell? A character you wanted to describe? A social tension you wanted to explore?

If you find it difficult to identify the driving purpose of why you wrote the story, it might be an indication that readers won't find purpose in it either. Not every story has a big, overarching statement to it ("This story means you shouldn't tell lies!" "This story means freedom is good!"), but most do have something urgent and imperative that has to be told or implied. If there is no imperative, then why are we reading? Why are you writing?

The point is not to question yourself until you're a trembling wreck. The point, rather, is to begin looking at your work with a more critical and discerning eye, to figure out what will be lasting about your work -- what will make it stay in a reader's mind. What can a reader learn from your story? What moment will make him think, "I feel the same way"? Make sure your story has an imperative that answers this question, in one way or another.

Photo of the Week

ho il destino tatuato sul collo non posso leggerlo da solo ho bisogno dei tuoi occhi sempre dietro., originally uploaded by Frammenti di momenti_.

Great shot here, both mysterious and alluring. Maybe you can write a piece about how this woman is.

5 Stories NOT to Send to Magazines

Now that I've worked in the offices of two different prestigious literary magazines, I've learned a thing or two about what comes in the slush pile most often. It's astonishing how many stories arrive that run through nearly identical storylines or patterns. While there is an exception to every rule, and any one of these stories could be written beautifully and prove me wrong, I've heard editors at both magazines declare they will never publish some of the below storylines because they're so ubiquitous and interchangeable.

So if you're on the publishing trail, be warned and avoid these five plotlines!

The break-up

Yes, break-up stories are the NUMBER ONE story we get in the slush pile. They are everywhere, and every last one of them hashes over the same details, the same gradual growing apart, the same pattern of fights and touching reunions. Avoid this most common of storylines.

Diary of the madman

This is another one that I've seen many many times in workshops as student work, but never successfully in print. It's because it was done almost two hundred years ago (Gogol's Diary of a Madman) and few works since have added much to the genre. A story with gleefully over-the-top prose, cliche phrasings, and quivering narcissism is so not new.

Dead child

This may sound callous, but I went to a panel discussion of several editors of literary magazines lately, and they all agreed this was the most common plot choice of all. Need a crisis for your characters to slowly and poignantly recover from? No problem -- just kill off a kid! Seriously, there's no describing how tragic this event is in real life, but in story world, this plotline has been done and done.

After the jump: two more plotlines to avoid.

Run Two Stories, Big and Small, Side By Side

My professor last semester had worked in television at one point in his career, and he had a lot of new insights about how stories work to teach us. Stories on television are highly stereotyped and rely on the same conventions over and over, but there's a reason for that -- those conventions work. Certain elements of suspense and plot structure pop up again and again because they naturally get readers or viewers invested in a story. Today I want to talk about one plot structure that both tv shows and short stories use often.

TV shows often have what's known as an A line and a B line in one episode. The A line is the most important plotline running through the episode, while the B line is something peripheral, funny, or superficial. Ambitious shows like Seinfeld actually had an A, B, C, and D line in most episodes. The important thing about having these multiple stories running along is how they eventually inform each other. Something that happens in the B line makes the character realize what to do in the A line, or something done selfishly in the B line proves his downfall in the A line. It's inevitable that the two lines meet, or else the story is unsatisfying.

After the jump: how this would work in a real story.

Buzz: Tips for Writer's Block

Today's post is brief, but I think you'll find something about it inspiring. I'm highlighting a post that I found very interesting. It's a great resource list of 100 Tools to Turn to When You Have Writer's Block. There are plenty of ideas here to get you going again if you're spinning your wheels. I would add just one caveat to it -- writer's block is largely an illusion. It's all in your head; the moment you stop believing it's real, it goes away. So use these tools as a way to wake up and remind yourself that you are in control of your creativity.

What Is Your Character's Drug of Choice?

Here's a bold statement, but one that I think you'll agree with: we're all addicts in one way or another. That's not to belittle the devastating consequences of drug or alcohol addiction, but it's true that there's something that all of us crave or depend on, something we can't live without, something that we don't feel fully ourselves unless we have. That thing can be harmful (like drugs) or it can be fairly neutral (like coffee) or it can even be helpful (like love). In a way, we don't really know who we are as people or characters until we know what we can't live without.

So this week I want to think about your character and what he or she is addicted to. What is an essential part of their routine or their sense of self and normalcy? Is it a substance, like sugar or coffee or tobacco or cheese puffs? Is it junk in general, or caffeine, or booze? Is it a person? Is it a memory? Is it a pet or a place? There are many things that we may use as our drug of choice, and thinking about it will enable you to see your character in a clearer light. We see our characters best when we understand not only what is best about them, but it is disappointing or frail about them. When we understand what small thing could tip the balance into despair, then we really know a person and what he or she clings to for sanity and normalcy.

It may be useful to think about what your drug of choice is as well. What keeps you sane and feeling complete? Or are you the rare soul that lives a completely independent life? Think carefully before you answer; I bet there's something -- or someone -- you don't feel yourself without.

Photo of the Week

Bamburgh Castle, originally uploaded by Billy Currie.