Creative Writing Corner

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It's official: the days of Creative Writing Corner are numbered! If you haven't heard yet, the site has gotten a brand new design and new features over at Writerlylife.com. It's a great new site, with a streamlined reading experience, easier comment tracking, and the same great content you'd expect. I'm adding new features as well, including more reviews of books and writing tools, and more guest posts from readers. If you're interested in gaining some exposure for your blog and writing a guest post for Writerly Life, check out the information here.

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5 Steps for a Killer Beginning

I’ve heard again and again from agents, editors, publishers, and literary magazine readers how absolutely crucial it is to have a killer beginning to your story. If the first few pages are great, readers will often be willing to slog through a slow middle; and they’ll be far more likely to recommend it to other people. You only get one chance for a first impression, so be sure to tackle your beginning with everything you’ve got. Here are five things just about every killer beginning needs.

ACTION
Too many mediocre stories begin with a long meandering morning, or a dry reflection on what the story means or what the character’s personality is. Instead, we need a strong moment of action to get pulled into the story. It doesn’t have to be a guy leaping from a helicopter as it explodes, but it should be something visual, strong, and striking — a character making a surprising decision, or a moment of subtle violence (cutting oneself while chopping vegetables, or almost getting in a car accident). Any action that gets the reader’s attention is welcome in a story’s beginning, as long as it matches the tenor of the rest of the story.

CHARACTER
This is probably the most crucial element of a story, and so it should be emerging strongly in the beginning. Too many beginning writers begin by describing an empty setting, like the house without a mention of who lives there, or what a beach looks like with no mention of who will be tanning on it. In reality, these settings might be beautifully described, but we don’t read for the setting — we read for a person’s interaction with the setting.

read about the other three steps at Writerly Life...

How to Get Lost and Why You Should

At the writing program I just chaperoned for, one of the getting-to-know-you exercises we used on our first night involved asking each other questions that we had written on slips of paper. One of the questions that really got people thinking was one I'm proud to say I wrote: "When was the last time you were completely lost?" You could interpret "lost" to be whatever you wanted, whether spiritually, geographically or mentally, and some of the answers were very interesting. It made me convinced that everyone, but especially writers, need a time of feeling lost every now and then. Here are a few reasons why you should get lost, how it will help your writing, and how to do it yourself.

Challenge Your World.

Winston Churchill said, "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." That's a very true sentiment about the way we perceive the world and how much we try to preserve our view of it. To entertain challenging thoughts about religion or politics or other big ideas is frightening, because we might become completely lost in the thicket of confliction notions. If you've always believed in a God, for example, you might feel lost if you start wondering whether there really is one. But this kind of wondering is good for you. Your story will not be compelling if it is a smug little lecture on how things are. Readers want the questioning and wondering agony that getting lost entails.

How to get lost in this way: read the religious text of a religion that is foreign to you. Ask yourself why so many people believe in it.

Continue reading at Writerly Life...

What Do You Take? What Do You Leave Behind?

I'm still away on the writing trip, readers, but I thought I'd post a quick writing exercise to keep you eager for more here at Writerly Life. As the girls around me pick and choose what souvenirs to take home from their trip, I'm beginning to wonder what goes into a choice like that in general. How do we decide that one object is worth saving, while another will only add to the growing clutter in our lives? I sometimes think of myself as a cluttered minimalist; I deeply admire the ethic of minimalism and always dream of having a living space that is stripped down. But at the same time, I can't help valuing some bits of clutter in my life, and I cling to some objects, filling them with sentimental value. Memory is important to me, and memory often requires triggers, concrete things we can look at and hold in order to conjure up that image of the day at the beach or the trip to the big city.

So today, try to turn this question onto yourself, and turn it onto your fictional characters. What do you leave behind? How do you choose? What makes an object live for you or your character? Does he or she value concrete memory triggers like souvenirs (meaning "to remember" in French)? If your character had to leave everything but a few objects behind, what would he or she choose to take and why? It reveals a tremendous amount about a character to see what he would take in a fire or how much he wants to get rid of during a vigorous spring cleaning. Some people cling to their clutter with surprising desperation. They begin to link the memory with the object until they are convinced the memory will no longer exist if they lose the object. Keeping that souvenir, they think, is the only way to preserve events in time, to keep them alive.

And there are other people who have absolutely no sentimentality about objects, who find it all part of the trash heap of the world, all useless. This extremely practical approach can be taken to as neurotic an extreme as hoarding. Today, try thinking about what side of the spectrum you and your character veer towards.

Read more at Writerly Life...