writer’s tools

You are currently browsing articles tagged writer’s tools.

Writers Tools, Cut-and-Don’t-Paste

January 31, 2011 in Writing | 5 comments

PinterestEmailShare

UPDATE at 12:25:  Just saw my post is up at The Blood-Red Pencil on Amazon vs Smashwords! W00t!!

I now return you to the regularly scheduled post:

I have a writerly flaw. Shut up–I’m just talking about the one today, okay?

The flaw for today is: I start the story too early. Plots are hard for me and, even if I have an idea of where I want the story to go, I need to sit down and start writing before the characters get comfortable in my head and come alive to me and move into the actions that take them to the climax of the story. I’m also an edit-as-you-go writer, which means that, by the time the action actually begins, I’ve put in considerable time and effort on the stuff I’ve already written.

This means that I’m invested in a lot of material I don’t really need, and it’s pretty nicely done. My friends and admirers (I do have them) like the writing in the beginning bits, and I’m encouraged to keep them in because the beginning bits DO establish setting, character, voice and resonate with the coming conflict.

But that doesn’t mean those bits belong there, especially in a short story.

In a novel, you can afford to ride a bit on style–not long, but a bit. In a short story–especially a genre short story–not so much.

Not that every short story has to begin with somebody kicking down a door and striding in, guns and/or singing sword blazing, but….

Case in point: “Home on the Range” is a funny story. When anybody who has read it tells anybody else about it, they say, “It’s about a talking, smart-mouth, pot-smoking cow.” The cow doesn’t come into it for a lo-o-o-o-ong time. I should have opened the story with the conversation in which the main character is warned about the “wild cow” in the woods by her new home. Then, when she finds the wild cow in her kitchen and learns that “wild” doesn’t mean “undomesticated” but trash-talking and pot-smoking, there you go. But, no. I started way too far back, and the story lost impact because of it.

By the way, “Home on the Range” is in the Southern Indiana Writers Group’s anthology, IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING.

If you’re a writer who tends to write too much lead-in, remember your old pal cut-and-paste. Make a folder called Scraps or Cuttings or Bits & Bobs, and use it for all the beautiful writing or interesting bits you’ve written that slow down the story but are too good to delete. Maybe you can use them dynamically somewhere else, or maybe you can just run them through the fingers of your mind like so many jewels. But don’t let them spoil your story before it starts.

WRITING PROMPT: Try to write a very boring scene. See how long it takes you to make it interesting in spite of yourself. Cut all the boring stuff.

MA

PinterestEmailShare

Tags: ,

Writers Tools: Newspapers

January 3, 2011 in Writing | 4 comments

PinterestEmailShare

I go through the morning paper front-to-back. Granted, so much of it is now online that it takes no more than half an hour to go through the paper version, but still. I don’t read every article, but I scan all the headlines and read a lot of the articles. And, of course, the comics, the advice column and the pro football scores. (Go COLTS!)

In what way does it help me as a writer? Oh, so many ways!

As I said in an earlier post, the classified section is packed with useful stuff: pictures of cars, houses and pets my characters might have, listings of jobs I could use in stories, personal ads that could be a plot or a sub-plot.

Obituaries sometimes give long accounts of people’s lives. A character could have all or some of those experiences, or could be related to someone with some or all of them. If nothing else, it’s a great exercise to take an obituary and write a character study from it or a paragraph exploring a moment in that life. The three words, “Pearl Harbor survivor”….

One of my favorite exercises is to take a story from the front page of one section and a story from an inside page of another section and write a scenario in which they’re connected. Sherlock Holmes used to do this sometimes. Well, not write stories, but see the connection between separate news items.

As someone who sometimes writes science fiction, I’m interested in the science section. There was a story today NOT in the science section that I loved: They’re talking about providing a football player who is now paralyzed from the waist down with robot-like legs. So I’m leaping into the future and thinking: What about robotic braces, strong and thin, under the skin, Powered and manipulated by the body’s own electrical impulses, so paralysis is a thing of the past? Or has that already been done?

Anyway, you see why I–as my husband says–”memorize the paper” every day. Just doing my job, sir.

WRITING PROMPT: Memorize the paper.

MA

PinterestEmailShare

Tags:

Writer’s Tools: PhotographS

July 19, 2010 in Writing | 2 comments

PinterestEmailShare

Last Monday, I wrote about how the mere act of taking photographs is a writer’s tool. Today is all about the snappies.

Let’s do the obvious first: photographs capture moments in time. Memories, right there on a piece of paper. If you want to relive a moment, you can look at a photograph you or someone else took of that moment and there it is–a piece of it, anyway. You want to describe your mother’s kitchen in 1964? You want to write a poem about yourself on your prom night? You can’t remember if Cousin Julia was already going downhill at the reunion last year? Look at a picture. Remember.

But pictures are also raw material. You can mine your pictures for what W. S. Gilbert (of the comic opera team Gilbert & Sullivan, children) called, in The Mikado, “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”. And, for this, you aren’t limited to your own photographs.

I cut pictures out of the newspaper (after everyone has finished reading it, of course) of houses my characters could live in or need to go to. I tear pages out of catalogs of household goods, clothing, jewelry–not that I intend to describe sheets or flatware or necklaces unless those are essential to the story–but to help me get a fuller feeling of characters. “Oh! She would SO TOTALLY wear that to church!”

Pamphlets of vacation destinations, especially with street maps and photographs of points of interest, are great for thinking about settings. If you change the name of the spot, you don’t even have to worry about getting everything right. You need that street to be one-way north and it’s one-way south? But you’re not writing about THIS town; you’re writing about another town that’s very like it, only this street runs the other way.

Finally, I love to collect discarded photographs. Sometimes I’ll find a picture tucked into a used book, or on the ground by a trash bin, and those are pure gold. Who are those people in that picture? What were they thinking; what were they doing? Who had this picture? Why doesn’t he or she have it any more?

And, speaking of pictures, I’m still running a comment contest on this picture from yesterday’s post. The contest runs through July 31. Leave a comment on the Sparks o’ Joy post guessing what you think it is, and you’ll be entered to win a free e-copy of LONNIE, ME AND THE HOUND OF HELL.

MA

writing prompt: Look through some photos of people you don’t know and make up a story line about them. Or look at a picture from a magazine or the newspaper and, without reading the caption or story, make up your own story about who the people are, what they’re doing, what they were doing before and will do after the picture was taken.

PinterestEmailShare

Tags: ,

Writer’s Tools: PhotographY

July 12, 2010 in Writing | 5 comments

PinterestEmailShare

Not photographS–that’s for another day. Today, I’m talking about the act of, the habit of (not to say “the obsession with”) taking snappies.

With digital cameras, you aren’t edged into caution by the costs of film and developing; you can snap anything that takes your fancy. And that’s where photography–the gerund “taking pictures”–becomes an important tool for a writer or a writer-in-training.

You find you start noticing things that would have melted into the background. I took this picture the other evening. If I hadn’t formed the habit of carrying my camera and snapping pictures of things, my eye would have slid over it. As it is, I saw it–I saw it. I considered it. I weighed it in my mind. I saw a certain niftiness in it and I preserved it.

When I got home, I put it on my computer and considered it again. This is not the picture I snapped; this is a cropped version. Once I saw it on the screen, I had the chance to decide how to crop it so it was clear what I thought was nifty in that shot. I could eliminate the stuff that I thought detracted from what interested me and leave in what I felt made a nice frame or contrast to it. You may disagree with my choices, but they’re my choices.

It’s a writer’s attitude: The world is your material. Grab pieces of it like a pack-rat. Bring the pieces home and explore them and contemplate them. Use them. Enjoy them.

MA

writing prompt: Even if you don’t have a camera, walk through the world as if you could snap shots of it. What would you snap? That motorcycle? How would you describe it in a story? Would you ever need to describe a motorcycle so that the description mattered?

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
PinterestEmailShare

Tags: