Creative Writing Corner

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.

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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.

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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.

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How To Do Your Homework

It may sound obvious. But for those of us who are a few years away from the years of daily schoolwork, or for students who want a refresher, it's important to know how to do your homework. Writers do homework too — in fact, their writing suffers if they haven't done it right. I want to talk today about how to do your writing homework.

Homework is about two main things: learning, and preparation. You've got to learn new concepts, but you've also got to prepare yourself to be doing the real work in the future, whether it's taking the math test or writing the story. Homework is like the stretching before the big run: it's essential warm-up to make your run the best it can be. And just like the marathon or the math test, creative writing benefits from a little stretching beforehand.

1. Do Your Research.

This is the most obvious form that homework takes when you're doing creative writing. Some stories require specialized information, and even not highly technical stories usually benefit from more detail. If you're writing a story that is set on a farm, for example, it's important that you know when planting season is and how the procedure of milking a cow happens. So before you start your next story, take a few notes on the setting, the street names, the procedures and shop talk of the world you intend to inhabit.

2. Don't Be Lazy

Homework discourages laziness in your work because it forces you get up and get moving, to be thinking, working, and asking questions of yourself. That's why writers have to do their homework. It may mean doing a writing exercise to keep yourself limber even when you don't have a story going. It might mean forcing yourself to write a little every day or at least look at what you've written and edit it a bit. If you're trying to get it published, it could be double-checking the editor's name and polishing up your cover letter. It means putting in the extra mile to make sure your story is as good as it can be, and that it's ready for showtime.

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How to Use Animals In Your Writing

read the whole post at Writerly Life... My professor this past spring was very keen on using the concrete elements of our daily life to act as metaphors for what is going on in our stories. There are so many great ways to use ordinary objects, he told us, and one of the best things to use as a vehicle in your story is animals. Animals are all around us, and have an impact on most of our daily lives. They live in our houses, hop around on our lawns, keep us company when we're lonely, wrack us with grief when they die, illustrate how children grow up and how aging happens. More than that, though, they are still somewhat mysterious to us. We don't know what a cat is thinking or what a dog sees. No matter how clear it seems, we are really only guessing and anthropomorphizing. That's why they serve as great vehicles in a story.

A terrific example of the use of animals to make the main plot stand out more strongly is in Coetzee's masterful novel Disgrace. In this novel, a shocking act of violence among humans forms the central act of the plot, but it is paired, paralleled, and contrasted with the tragic machinations of a nearby animal shelter. The lead character must euthanize unwanted dogs every week, and the extraordinary care and respect with which he treats the bodies shows his deep wells of emotion, his regret at the way other events have transpired, his truly human side. It is a stunning way to make the reader feel the human drama that much more deeply.

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From the Minimalist: Wash Your Bowl

read the whole article at Writerly Life... I was reading a blog about minimalism as a lifestyle the other day and I stumbled across a very interesting article, one that is very relevant to creative writers. It's called Wash Your Bowl, and it's about a Zen koan or religious parable designed to be a lesson about maintaining a Buddhist mentality and way of life. Visit the site to see what the story is all about. If you'd like the Cliffs Notes version, I'll tell you that a monk seeking enlightenment asks a wise master how to achieve it, and is told to wash his bowl because he has been eating rice out of it. While the parable can seem baffling at first, there's a good point to be made here about leading a conscious (and creative) life.

Concentrate on What You Are Doing!

In the parable, the monk makes the mistake of trying to wonder about distant theological questions while there is still work to be done right in front of him. His head is so far in the clouds that he can't see his own two feet. We often make this mistake in our daily lives, and in our fiction as well. We're so worried about the climax that we don't give the scene we're currently working on enough attention, or we know the big abstract things about our characters, like their religion and their greatest fear, but not how they take their tea or what songs they sing in the shower. These immediate things are what give readers a more genuine experience of your characters' inner lives.

Keep It Simple.

The other thing this parable teaches is that things are often simpler than they seem. Want to be enlightened? That doesn't mean learning the secrets of the universe — it means living a fully conscious life, in which you are aware and appreciate of everything around you. Creative writers would do well to remember this lesson too: fiction suffers when it gets airy and overwrought, but is most memorable to us when it becomes a little more minimalistic.

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What Was Your Grown Up Moment?

As a young person, there were many times when I wondered, Am I grown up yet? It seemed like I was learning a tremendous amount about the world all the time — wasn't it time to start considering myself mature, with all the wisdom and experience of an adult? Whenever something serious or frightening happened, though, I discovered all over again that I was still a child, wanting the comforts of childhood, responding to situations in a childish way. As I got still older, I started to learn that adulthood might not be as wonderful and simple a thing as it seemed. In fact, it is usually tragedy or sorrow or disappointment that finally makes us feel grown-up.

The blurry line between childhood and adulthood is an important one to explore in your stories and when creating your characters. Just about everyone has a moment when they started to feel like an adult. Did it take a death in the family? A realization that your parents weren't invincible? The fall of a hero of yours? Or discovering in adequacies in yourself? A "grown-up moment" is often a fall from bliss, but it usually leaves us wiser and with a clearer vision of how the world works. It is a hopeful moment, to me; when a veil is lifted from our eyes, we're freer to understand and grow.

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How You're Sitting On Your Best Material

In a creative writing class this past semester, the professor had us do an autobiographical assignment. While I normally shy away from writing about my life, I decided to take the plunge and write about more intimate aspects of my life and psyche than I normally delve into. The piece was a real success and was liked by the class. The professor, naturally, asked why this material I wrote about never made it into my fiction. He pointed out that my hesitation about it might actually indicate that I was sitting on my best material.

That got me thinking about what we choose to write about, and whether those choices are always the right ones. There are many things in our lives — usually dark times or more upsetting memories — that we choose not to think about on a daily basis. We want to skip right over those moments that we feel confused or angry or sad about. So when we're running through our minds for story ideas, that same instinctive skip happens — don't want to dig that up with all its unpleasant emotion, so let's move on to something I feel less deeply about.

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How to Write Under Stressful Conditions

 Carrying a heavy burden these days? Writing can help.

As stressful events in my life collide a little in these weeks, I've been thinking about how one is supposed to keep their creative writing going in the face of obstacles. It's difficult enough to imagine and plan writing time when everything in life is going well and you feel emotionally happy and ready to tackle work. If a stressful or upsetting event enters your life, on the other hand, it can seem virtually impossible to put a pen to the page when other things are happening. Here are a few common stress pitfalls, and ways to resolve or handle them.

Fight the guilt.

So something distressing has happened in your life or to a loved one. Dramatic events have a way of making normal things seem trivial or even frivolous. You may feel a little selfish for trying to get your own artistic work done while things are so chaotic.

To combat this feeling, remind yourself that your heart is in the right place. As long as you're not neglecting who or what needs attention, then there's nothing wrong with getting a little pleasure out of what you love to do. In fact, the first step toward regaining a sense of normalcy in your life is to start doing those things that make you feel like you the most. So no matter how busy things get in the wake of a disaster, set aside time for your writing.

Leave yourself time for thought.

This new event is probably dominating your thoughts during the day and might even be keeping you up nights. That's especially why it feels difficult to write — you haven't thought about your story at all, so it won't come to you! Setting aside time for thinking is just as important as writing. So during your downtime, instead of shutting your brain off to watch tv, surf the web, or take a break in another way, take a thoughtful break. Get a drink, sit in a comfortable chair, and think. What do you want to write? What have you learned about the world lately that you want to capture in your fiction?

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What Makes Religious Writing?

Image from Village Zendo.

Recently I've found myself becoming more and more interested in what people would call "religious writing." That doesn't mean modern sermons and proselytizing documents; I'm more interested in ancient myths, folktales, religious poetry, and parables. The mystery, reverence, and good old-fashioned tale-telling found in these forms can be very informative for modern creative writing. But it's gotten me wondering what exactly makes writing seem "religious" these days.

There are the official, canonical documents of the world religions, of course. The stories and even the writing style of the Bible has affected western writers for centuries; its power and declamatory style make for very effective fiction writing. In particular, I can see a fave writer of mine, John Steinbeck, being strongly influenced by the Bible. Other writers have borrowed cadences or whole passages from the Qur'an, the Torah, the Vedas, the Sutras, and others. What fascination do religious texts hold for writers?

One attraction, I think, is the combination of antiquity and universalism. These texts come from unimaginably distant civilizations in human history. At the same time, the concerns they express are astoundingly similar to the problems we face. These documents ask poignantly what the role of families versus the church is, or how we can overcome the fear of death. They show the tenderness of human relationships, such as the touching tale of Vasitthi the Madwoman in Buddhism. In this tale, a woman's child dies, and she goes mad, refusing to believe that he is dead. She carries his body from door to door in the village, begging for help. Only the Buddha can make her realize both that her son has died, and how inevitable that death was. Her grief is as palpable as it would be today.

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