Shame and Despair

Comedy is not generated by a writer who sails to her desk saying, “Now I will be funny”. It comes from someone who crawls to her desk, leaking shame and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is, the better it is: slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.

—Hilary Mantel, from this interview in The Guardian

Call for Proposals: Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

The 2018 call for proposals is now open! Deadline May 2. Click here for more.

Three tiny exercises

Here are three tiny exercises to try if you're feeling stuck, or want to get a quick glimpse of your work from different angles. 

1.

“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.”

—Paul Cézanne

Set your timer for two minutes and write down all the emotions in which your current work began. 

2.

Do you remember the first image or two that came to you as you conceived of what you're now working on? Set the timer for two minutes and write them down. 

3.

If you could hand something to one of your main characters right now, what would it be? It can be an ordinary object, a magical object, the deed to a house, whatever occurs to you. You can give it to them in person or through another one of your characters. Five minutes.

Pyramid Scheme

". . . that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true

that cartoon black castle with a single bird flying over it . . . "


"Pyramid Scheme" by Hera Lindsay Bird


I think this poem is the patron saint of my new novella. 

Passion, patience, obsession

From an interview by Alexander Chee with Ursula K. Le Guin in Guernica.

New Moon Exercise

Night before last was the new moon: a good time for quiet reflection, for sitting with darkness, for planting seeds. What seeds would you like to plant for your writing? What in your writing most needs to grow over the next two weeks as the moon waxes? 

Here's an exercise: Your main character (or another you want to work with) is sowing seeds in her life. Literally or metaphorically. Show us what she's doing. It can be a tiny thing, throwing an apple core into the woods by the roadside . . . a big undertaking like planning a bank robbery . . . anything . . . Set your timer for fifteen minutes, begin with the idea of planting, and go from there.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove a poem must ride on its own melting

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.


—Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”

Mood Board

An Exercise

If you've ever worked in design or advertising, you might be familiar with the concept of "mood boards." These are meant to capture the mood, style, color scheme, etc., of the project you're conceptualizing.

The point of this exercise is to create something similar but in written form.

Instead of taking visual images from pinterest, etc., use words to sketch a few images that have something to do with your story. (Even if you don't know why they popped into your head!) In one paragraph each, paint quick pictures that capture something about the mood and feel of your story.

This should be totally freeform and come in a stream-of-consciousness way. Don't think too much! Don't copy anything you've already written. Make a mess!

Use lots of sensory details: colors, shapes, sounds, smells.

Set your timer for fifteen minutes and sketch as many images as you can.

No tears in the writer

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

― Robert Frost, from "The Figure a Poem Makes," 1939


What does this quote mean to you? Does your story ever surprise you? Does it evoke a strong emotional reaction—not the trickiness of trying to get it "right," or make it "good," but the story and characters themselves? Do they feel that real to you? Do you ever find it's a struggle to care about them?

Cliches

People often say they worry about their writing being cliched. Sometimes this even stops them from making progress. In twenty-five years of teaching and writing, I have found that what leads writing to be cliched (and everyone is susceptible at times) is actually shallowness, or lack of honesty with ourselves. We're looking to sound a certain way: clever, for example. We're looking at the surface of our writing, rather than really going to a raw or risky or unknown place with it. It's when you allow yourself to make a mess that you move through and beyond the place of shallowness and cliches. If this worry gets in your way next time you're writing, try this. Instead of asking yourself, "Does this sound stupid/clever/cliched," ask, "Does this feel true?" (Or does it feel real, honest--find the word that works for you.) 

“I had this idea that to be a good writer you wrote these pretty sentences. The biggest thing I learned at [the] Iowa [Writers' Workshop] was that being a good writer has everything to do with telling a truth about what it means to be a human being.”
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—Ayana Mathis