Creative Writing Corner

Why I Said No to NaNoWriMo

For several years in a row, while in high school and then college, I was an enthusiastic participant in NaNoWriMo. I still think it's a great way to get people excited about the craft of writing, and it could be a good way to show beginners or scoffers just how difficult writing is. However, a few years ago I decided I wasn't going to be joining the ranks anymore. I'll tell you my reasons why I think it's not for everyone.

It Saps Creativity.

The sheer effort of frantically pounding out 50,000 words in thirty days, contrary to popular opinion, doesn't actually help your creativity. I see people doing the math on twitter: 1,600 words a day, so if I write an extra thousand of uninspired rambling today, then I won't have to write as much tomorrow. Frankly, that sort of thinking doesn't seem creative to me. Instead, it's encouraging the pouring out of structureless, un-special words. If the ideas aren't coming in as strictly regimented a way the words have to (and they almost never will), then it's not a big victory to write 50,000 words of nothing.

Quantity isn't Quality.

People have already started mentioning this one already, but I do think it's important. When you're bombing through that many words in that short a time, your writing is bound to not be at its best. And on top of that, the mentality required to get through it is not focussed enough on quality. So you're going to have to overcome two very big obstacles to good writing if you embark on the challenge.

It Won't Help You Improve

And I would say that's the big reason why I'm saying no to NaNo these days: I see no reason why this exercise actually leads to better writing. It can certainly be a fun project, and a good one to try, especially if you're just starting out at writing. But when I see people doing the project year after year, and yet not writing at all during the rest of the year, I wonder if they see their writing improving from year to year. From what I've seen of my own and other's efforts, the temptation is just to rehash cliches in order to get across that finish line.

So all up, I'm not condemning NaNoWriMo outright. But if you enter it hoping to really step up your writing game and reach the next level of professionalism and skill, I think you'll be disappointed. I suggest setting a more helpful goal for yourself, such as writing a really killer short story and editing it to perfection. That way you'll end up with work you'll be proud of at the end of the month, instead of just more work to shove to the back of a drawer.

From the Archives

It's time for your regular tour through the archives. Take a look at a few posts from roughly one year ago:

Music That Moves You?

Writing Idea: Bring a Family Together

Putting Details and Big Ideas Together

Teaching Creative Writing

Know Your Ending, But Don't Stick to It

  Without purpose, your story will wind in one
direction and then another.

A story is never more compelling than when it has direction and purpose, when it seems to be heading toward an inevitable clash or a certain doom. That sense of urgency and suspense keeps us turning the pages; but the only time a story can get better than this is when that expectation of certainty is surprised or upset. In order to get to that surprise, though, we needed that galloping direction in the first place.

Today I want to talk to you about that crucial two-part aspect of the writing process: having an ending in mind, but not sticking to it. I'll tell you why you'll run into problems if you have no ending in mind at all; and then I'll tell you why you may have just as many problems if you've planned everything out in advance.

Why Having No Ending is Problematic

A lot of people with artistic mentalities feel defensive about making a plan. They picture the dull, concrete outline of a five-paragraph high school English paper, and they recoil in horror. "It's more natural to just let the story flow," they say. "I can't impose limits on my writing. I can't plan ahead. I just write as it comes to me."

While these people may feel more artsy for doing this, their stories will suffer terribly. The way great stories usually work is that they have very tight structures, with arcs, climaxes, skillful introductions and discrete scenes. All of these things take planning; while a few things may happen naturally, all of them won't. It's important to try looking down the road at what you want to be your climactic moment, or what event will rock your character to his core. Without these things, your story will be directionless, wandering in first one direction and then another. It won't make sense, and worse, it'll be boring.

After the jump: why having too much planned is just as bad.

How to Use Your Own Local Color

A term my professor has been using in class a lot lately is "local color." He began pointing it out when we were reading Jhumpa Lahiri's masterful short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Often in those stories, we're treated to touches of Bengali food, dress, or culture. When Lahiri draws upon her own knowledge to give us information about a world we don't know, that's local color. As readers, we're excited to learn about Bengali dishes or how exactly a sari is worn. It's new, unfamiliar, and vividly described. A lot of the drama of a particular scene can be, simply, this exploration of a new world.

While a Bengali-American such as Lahiri can draw upon obviously foreign things to an American readership, the point my professor made was that we all have our own version of local color. Local color is just bringing news from another world, and the worlds we all grew up in have their own variations, rules, and foods. Many white people tend to think they don't have any "culture" or "ethnicity." In reality, everyone has a culture with rules of its own, and it's writers who can observe these small things that decorate and inform our worlds.

After the jump: an unlikely source of local color.

How to Improve Your Transitions

 With transitions, it's best to jump in head first.

Transitions are such tricky times. You want to leave your reader at the maximum of suspense as you complete a scene, but you also want a feeling of completion; you can't leave a reader feel like you have used a cheap device. At the same time, your next sentence had better be killer, to hook you back in the story. Each line break or scene break in your story is basically a new chance to engage and excite your reader, and yet these breaks are often ignored. So I'd like to give a few tips about making your transitions vivid.

Avoid Goosebumps tricks.

Did you ever read those Goosebumps books when you were a kid? They may have been fun when you were eight or nine, but they use some pretty cheesy devices to keep the story going. Often, a chapter break will be almost in the middle of a thought, forcing you to read to the next chapter. Or else it will be a completely false escalation of suspense, such as: "He loomed over her, cackling... Chapter Two: ...to give her a hug." Believe it or not, even books for adults sometimes use this, and whenever I read it I feel like I'm being very clumsily manipulated. (From what I've heard, The Da Vinci Code uses this heavily.)

Hint at the next problem to be faced.

A really tight short story always has a feeling of urgency and anxiety coursing through it. Even if one problem is resolved, the writer should remind us of other problems before concluding the scene. We don't want it to feel like things are all wrapped up two scenes before the end; otherwise, why are we reading those last two scenes? If you've solved one problem, remind us of the other problem at the end of one scene.

Begin the next scene with action.

Say the previous scene has ended with a decision that the girl must go to the house of her ex-boyfriend. A common mistake is to start the next scene with her driving to the ex-boyfriend's house, or walking up to his door. Cut all that unnecessary bit out and just jump in to the first real moment of the scene. In this case, it would be the girl seeing the ex-boyfriend face to face. You don't need to tell us that she knocked on his door; we know that will happen! Get to the good part and make your transition immediate and memorable.

Photo of the Week

Postcards from Far Away, originally uploaded by buttonmoOon.

The greyish melancholy of this scene, shot through with streaks of sunlight, is quite lovely. Hopefully it will get you in a writerly mood.

From the Archives

It's time for your regular tour through the archives. Take a look at a few posts from roughly one year ago:

What Makes You Really Angry?

Stewing In Your Own Juice

Why Self-Publishing is a Bad Idea

What is it Really Like to Be a Writer?

Identify what Prose You Love

There are books out there that I love, and among those I can make divisions. Some I love for the story, characters, or ideas. Others I love purely for their stunning prose. As a writer, I think it's important to find which prose I love and wish I could emulate in my work. So be discerning in your reading. Ask yourself, is this writing I'd like to do someday? Does this match my style? Do I want my style to be more or less like this? Is this good or bad writing? And more than that, figure out what you like specifically and what you would leave behind. Be choosy. Pick out the small things you admire.

To get you started, I'd like to comment on a few writers I've been reading lately for my class.

Nabokov
While there are many things to admire about this extraordinary writer, only some of his techniques are things I'd want in my own fiction. Namely, I love his verb choices. He often picks a highly unusual choice of verbs, making the sentence "pop" in a completely surprising way. It's about a deep facility with the language that leads to an astonishing precision.

Lorrie Moore
There are a ton of things I love about Lorrie Moore. If I had to choose one, I would say her ability to insert humor into sad situations. While much has been written about her sense of humor, I've always seen her funny writing as used to make moments seem even more sad and poignant. We use humor, in our fumbling human way, to deal with and comprehend tragedy, and Moore captures that brilliantly again and again.

Jhumpa Lahiri
Like other writers I love, there are many things to study about Lahiri's writing. If I had to pick one, though, that I'd like to steal, it would be Lahiri's gift for the telling gesture or detail that I admire most. She often assigns her characters one singular action or moment that perfectly tells us volumes about that character's personality or motivations.

Have the Courage to Start Again

Sometimes you start work on a story and plunge your heart and soul into it. You put your tears and sweat into this story, and when things seem to get tough you keep tinkering and re-tinkering with it, trying to figure out a way to make it work. It's a losing battle, but you're afraid to let it go.

Or else you've just successfully finished a story. It took a tremendous amount of effort, but you worked hard and you know that it's some of your best work.

And now the blank page of your next project is staring you in the face.

So what do you do when you have to start again?

Beginnings, in addition to being the most important parts of stories, are also the most difficult to write. We can feel intimidated by the prospect of finding a new idea, finding that energy and drive and will to work again. Each new story is, for me at least, a whole new adventure, and a new time that I've got to get on the horse. It can be extremely daunting.

But the most important thing to remember is that a new project needs the courage and boldness that you put into your previous work. Sometimes stories die; there isn't much you can do about it. Dig into your new work with the same gusto you expressed in that earlier story. Or on the other side of things, congrats for writing a great story. Now get back to work! And you'd better bring the same energy that story was written with to your next piece.

After the jump: ways to write without fear.

What Do You Love About Halloween?

Happy Halloween, writers! I hope you're having a good time and are busily planning costumes, parties, and candy. I must say it's one of my favorite holidays, both for the sense of fun and the gorgeous fall foliage. In honor of the day, I'd like to direct you to the post I wrote a while back for a previous halloween about How to Write Horror. Enjoy, be safe, and don't let the zombies bite tonight!

Photo of the Week

Golden Gate Lights, originally uploaded by Wiggum03.

It's wonderful when a photograph or a piece of writing can make the familiar seem abruptly otherworldly and new. This gorgeous image of the golden gate bridge makes it seem like we're looking at a different planet or through the lens of a dream. Will it inspire you this week?

From the Archives

It's time for your regular tour through the archives. Take a look at a few posts from roughly one year ago:

Writing Exercise: Living Dangerously

The Need to Polish Your Stories

Creative Thesis, Entry 1

Leading Your Reader into a Labyrinth

A Quick Guide to Plagiarism

With the rise of internet has come a lot of marvelous things, from blogs like this (isn't it marvelous!) to the spread of easily accessible news and information. That great sharing of networking that makes the internet great, however, has also enabled a tremendous increase in plagiarism. As a writer, I can assure you that copying someone else's work is serious business, and it's incredibly hurtful to find something you sweated over somewhere else, under someone else's name. It's just plain disrespectful to the real work that went into creating the piece. So I'd like to clear up where I stand on a few gray areas of plagiarism, and give you a few tips on protecting yourself from plagiarism.

Lifting someone else's posts is plagiarism.
A common practice in the blog world these days, which I believe is called "scraping", is when someone will lift another blogger's rss feed and plunk it right down on his/her site without permission, attribution or even a link back to the original site. Let me be clear here: you're profiting from someone else's content and essentially pretending that this content is yours, even if you're not explicitly writing out, "I wrote this." Consider what this would be in the non-digital world: you copy and paste the entire text of Lorrie Moore's new novel and sell it. Yes, that would be illegal. So you can see how the same practice is wrong on the internet, right?

A blog post made up entirely of other's work, even with attribution, is plagiarism.
So you put the author's name at the bottom of the text you scraped. Whoop-de-doo for you. You're profiting from another author's content without his or her permission, basically claiming ownership for the text by having it as your content on your blog. Really, it's just laziness in this case; you want to have a blog, but you don't want to expend the effort to keep it up.

After the jump: ways to stay one jump ahead of the cheaters!

Can You Love Writing That is Morally Repugnant?

There are some writers who have such pure, unquestionable talent that you can't help falling in love with their prose. It doesn't matter if they're writing pages about dryer lint; the writing is so skillful, or so perfectly embodies something you wish you could do, that it doesn't matter what's being written about.

But what if the writing is on a morally questionable subject, or expresses a point of view that horrifies or disturbs you?

The question of separating aesthetics from morals has been circulating the literary world for decades, if not centuries. Is it possible, or preferable, to see beauty independent of its implications? Can anything morally repugnant ever be truly beautiful?

I came up against this problem with a few recent readings: first with Martin Amis' Success and then with some short stories of George Saunders. Both writers are, undeniably, bursting with raw talent. For years, they have wowed readers with their distinctive styles and writerly verve. I'd be perfectly happy to have the ease and delight with which these masters play with language.

After the jump: what's wrong with Amis and Saunders?

Photo of the Week

IC1396A The Elephant's Trunk Nebula, HaRGB, originally uploaded by write_adam.

To zoom out a little this week, take a look at this gorgeous image of the Elephant's Trunk nebula. Apparently there is a very bright star at the center of this mysterious formation of gas and dust. Pictures of the wonders of the universe always get me excited; what will it do for you?