Exercise for the day, 8/10: Make some rules

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance."

—James Baldwin 

What is your daily writing practice? Do you have one? Or do you too often let your writing time disappear because loading the dishwasher seems more urgent, or you're afraid the stuff you're writing isn't worthwhile?

Working on it is how you make it worthwhile. How you find out what is alive in it and what needs to be changed. What you care about vs what you were just faking.

I find it most helpful to write down one simple goal at a time, and put it somewhere I can see it (not just in my head). E.g. a post-it that says, "1,000 words/day" stuck to my computer. I tend to get distracted, so this keeps bringing me back to that one simple goal. Everything else is optional.

Here's a description of a more elaborate system from Aimee Bender. Hers includes accountability. Like having a jogging buddy, it can be great to have a writing buddy. This summer I've been pairing up my students to set daily goals and text each other a pencil emoji each day when they reach their goal. It's amazing how much it can help to know that someone out there is going to notice whether you text your pencil today or not.

Exercise for the day, 8/9: Do not mention the murder

Some exercises in description from John Gardner's classic The Art of Fiction. 

4a. Describe a landscape as seen by an old woman whose disgusting and detestable old husband has just died. Do not mention the husband or death. 

4b. Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder. Do not mention the murder. 

4c. Describe a landscape as seen by a bird. Do not mention the bird. 

4d. Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.

What do these have in common? They all concern description. They all use the phrase "as seen by," asking you to notice how your POV character's subjective way of seeing influences what appears in your story.  They all ask you to make us feel an emotional truth of the story by showing it though the character's experience, without telling us directly what it is.

(Note in 4d the phrase, in the same weather and at the same time of day. No rain for sadness/sunny days for happiness.)

You could choose one of these and spend ten minutes on it. Then, next time you sit down with your own story, think about how the surroundings are filtered through your character's experience. How description can be a tool to show your characters' emotions. How even a landscape can be saturated with mood and meaning.

Exercise for the day, 8/8: The spine of your story

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

—Jorge Luis Borges

For a minute, stop thinking about all the games you may want your story to play, and think about this. At a basic level, almost every story is about 

a character (at least one) 

who takes a journey 

from Point A to Point B. 

This could be an emotional journey, a physical one, or both. In some way, the character starts in one place on the first page, and ends up somewhere different by the last page. 

Who is your main character? Just for now, pick one.

What is the journey? Describe it in one sentence.

What is Point A--that is, where do we find your character on page 1?

What is Point B--what is the different place your character gets to by the last page?

Exercise for the day, August 7: Fix

Well, my process kind of works sideways. I never really think about taking on an issue or writing about a certain thing. It’s more about trying to find a voice that is fun to do and in which I can feel some sort of power. . . And then at some point you look up and you’ve made a person, who is in a certain fix. . . 

—George Saunders

George Saunders is a popular author (once had an essay featured on a Chipotle bag) and a writer's writer (lots of us love hearing him talk about his process, as here). His approach is literary: humane, intuitive, exploratory, character-focused. All things that feel familiar from my years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

I was surprised and thrilled when, years later, I read my first book on screenwriting. The blunt talk about plots, the nuts and bolts of creating momentum and excitement, hooking the audience, controlling pacing, raising stakes . . . these were things we were practically forbidden to talk about in graduate school. Why? The emphasis there was on creating literature, on some kind of search for truth that could not be hemmed in by prescriptive approaches. 

But really, when you come down to it, all of us have to navigate the same waters. We all have to deal with art and craft, character and plot, logic and mystery, creation and revision. 

Anyway, there's a short, fun screenwriting book called Save the Cat by Blake Snyder which I refer to a lot in my classes. It's incredibly prescriptive. In Snyder's carefully laid out theory, your story must have a handful of specific beats, and there's an actual page number where each one has to occur. Everything can be neatly plotted out on index cards. Very comforting. Even though it's an illusion. Even though I know that in reality Snyder had to trek through the same swamps as the rest of us, his thoughts about plot can be very useful.

Here's an exercise I like to do in class:

Six things that need fixing. This is my phrase, six is an arbitrary number, that stands for the laundry list you must show — repeat SHOW — the audience of what is missing in the hero's life. Like little time bombs, these Six Things That Need Fixing, these character tics and flaws, will be exploded later in the script, turned on their heads and cured.  

—Blake Snyder, Save the Cat 

Take ten minutes and brainstorm about your main character at the beginning of your story. What, in their life, needs fixing? Or in Saunders' words, what kind of fix are they in?

Note: Brainstorming means you write down any crazy idea that comes along, even if it makes no sense. You can always cross them off later. Don't stop writing till the timer goes off.

Exercise for the day, August 6: Make them wait four hours for dinner

Lee Child separates the question of good writing from the mechanics of getting the reader to turn the page, in his essay "A Simple Way to Create Suspense."

Read it, then look at his very short story "Guy Walks Into a Bar." 

To see what the story is doing, print it out or cut and paste it into a doc, so you can make margin notes. Every time Lee poses a question, make a note next to it: Q1 for the first, Q2 for the second. Then note where each question is answered: A1, A2 . . . Draw an arrow in the margin between each question and its answer.  This really lays out how the questions, answers, and partial answers lead you from one paragraph to the next.

Here's the first paragraph:

SHE was about 19. No older. Maybe younger. An insurance company would have given her 60 more years to live. I figured a more accurate projection was 36 hours, or 36 minutes if things went wrong from the get-go.

Are you going to read on? Why?

Writing exercise for the day, August 5: You don't choose a story

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you. 

—Robert Penn Warren

Have you been trying to choose your story? Or have you been letting one choose you?

Get a piece of paper and a pen, even if you never write that way. Fill half the page with answers to this question. Then get back to your writing.

Exercise for the Day, August 4: A Writer's Scaffolding

I eschew a distinction between “art” and “craft” in fiction because they aren’t terms in disagreement — the craft of writing fiction supports the art. 

—Jeff VanderMeer

This quote is from Jeff VanderMeer on the Art and Science of Structuring a Novel in Electric Literature. Here's a passage from it:

What do I mean by “a writer’s scaffolding”? I mean something in addition to what seem the basics of what I need to start writing after having first thought about a story for a long time. Those basics are pretty…basic. Knowing where the story starts; a character I’ve come to know well; a sense of where the character is going (either figuratively or literally); a charged image connected to the character; and an ending, even if that ending changes before I reach it.

Set the timer for ten minutes and ask yourself if you know the answers to these basic questions for your story.

What is a "charged image connected to the character" for you? Set the timer for five minutes and put down as much as you know about this image.

Fundraiser Update Post

August 3

UPDATE: Midnight: winners chosen at $120 and $110  

In addition, a third person donated to RAICES with the request that I give a free consult to a woman who is an immigrant with a story to tell. If you know of someone who might be interested, please pass on the info. CONTACT ME form is on the right side of this page. 

Thank you so much to all who bid! 

UPDATE 5:40 pm: Bids are up to $120 and $110

UPDATE 10:40 am: Bids are up to $100 and $110

I'm offering two private consults in at Hudson Valley Writers' Center in exchange for donations to RAICES Texas. Bidding ends midnight August 3. Donations made directly to RAICES - I'll ask for winners' receipts. Use the CONTACT ME form on the right to get in touch.

Private Consults / Donations to RAICES - Bidding Ends Tomorrow!

I'm offering two private consults in at Hudson Valley Writers' Center in exchange for donations to RAICES Texas.


Bidding ends midnight August 3


Opening bid for one is $25 and for the other only $5


Please bid whatever you can afford Donations will be made directly to RAICES - all I will ask for is the receipt.


Use the CONTACT ME form on the right to get in touch.

Exercise for the day August 2: Permission to be entertaining

People want a method to the form. Mine is the unmethod method. Get a little quiet. Ask the story what it is. “I’m boring,” the story says. Then give yourself permission to be entertaining.

—George Saunders

Bad choices make good stories 

—Some T-shirt

We can sometimes be overcautious with our main characters because we want readers to like them, or because we fear their extreme behavior could somehow reflect badly on us. What if you freed yourself of that? 

For your next scene: don't write what your character would do. Write what your character's evil twin would do.

When I give this exercise, the "evil twin" scenes often start out as just an experiment but end up in the actual story. . . because it turns out they're entertaining.