Creative Writing Corner

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Have you changed your bookmarks to Writerlylife.com yet?

If you haven't heard, Creative Writing Corner is rocking a brand new design and a new name, too, over at Writerlylife.com. The new site has taken off with a roar, and it's already opening up the discussion for what it's like to be a writer and lead a literary life. I'm delighted by the active discussion that's going on over there, and I don't want any readers of Creative Writing Corner to miss it.

For example, we had a great deal of discussion around my post, How to Write Under Stressful Conditions. Readers really identified with my discussion of how our creative lives suffer when we're under duress, but they can actually save us a little stress and get us feeling normal again.

And many readers had something to say when I asked What Your Ideal Writing Teacher was. Writing teachers have a lot to keep in mind when preserving a structured classroom while also encouraging creativity.

And plenty of Writerly Life regulars sounded off on my post How You're Sitting On Your Best Material. As it turns out, a lot of people had a similar experience to mine and found themselves unwilling to write about the exact aspect of their lives that would make the best story, purely because it is so emotional.

There's a lot going on at Writerly Life these days, and I wouldn't you to miss out. In another few weeks Blairhurley.com will cease to exist, and will forward to Writerly Life for a while; then it will become a more personalized profile page for my own work purposes. So act now!

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Visit the New Creative Writing Corner

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Creative Writing Corner Has Moved!

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The Countdown Begins!

Have you changed your bookmarks to writerlylife.com yet?

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.

Just as before, you can subscribe to Writerly Life's RSS feed, or get new posts right in your email inbox. Don't miss your chance to stay tuned in to Writerly Life! In 5 days, blairhurley.com will begin to forward automatically to Writerly Life. In another couple of weeks after that, blairhurley.com will direct you to a completely different site. So change those bookmarks! Get on over to the new site! And stay involved with the growing, changing, and expanding Writerly Life.

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...

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.

Continue reading at Writerly Life...

Two Week Vacation

Just to warn you, readers — the rate of posts will be somewhat slower in the next two weeks, as I'm acting as a chaperone for a teen writing workshop in New York. I'll be run off my feet for the next fourteen days, escorting young writers to cultural events in the city, mentoring them, helping them with writing, and all that exciting stuff.

You can still expect some great new posts to appear here at Writerly Life, from more responses to reader comments to some writing exercises and thoughts on my experience as a writing mentor here at the teen workshop. But posts will return to their regular frequency after two weeks.

Enjoy your summer, readers, and I hope to see you here at Writerly Life!

Mailbag: Stand Up For Your Writing!

A few weeks ago I wrote a rather passionate post, reminding you writers to Stand Up For Your Writing! A lot of people out there want to get you down, whether it's non-writers or other writers in your workshop, and it's important to remember that your writing has value. Readers agreed and sent in their thoughts in the comments. Jerry said:

Boy, did that ring a bell. More like a gong. From both side of the issue. Being over exuberant in my critiquing and sitting with red ears and a hot face while my writing is being lambasted. However a third situation I find even more frustrating. A group of writers who seemingly refuse to say anything that might hurt someone, who instead deprive the writer of much needed, and wanted, criticism.

Thanks, Jerry. I think this piece struck a nerve with a lot of readers — many writers out there have experienced a tough workshop and the feeling that people are ganging up on them. It's also easy to become the aggressors ourselves, eagerly piling critiques on as we observe them without thinking about how it might sound. That's why I don't want to sound bitter or blame others, because I'm sure I've been the workshop hyena myself at times. Let's all try to be a bit more sensitive!

Continue reading at Writerly Life...

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.

read the whole post at Writerly Life...

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.

Continue reading at Writerly Life...

Get to Writerlylife.com Pronto!

Have you changed your bookmarks to Writerlylife.com yet?

If you haven't heard, Creative Writing Corner is rocking a brand new design and a new name, too, over at Writerlylife.com. The new site has taken off with a roar, and it's already opening up the discussion for what it's like to be a writer and lead a literary life. I'm delighted by the active discussion that's going on over there, and I don't want any readers of Creative Writing Corner to miss it.

For example, we had a great deal of discussion around my post, How to Write Under Stressful Conditions. Readers really identified with my discussion of how our creative lives suffer when we're under duress, but they can actually save us a little stress and get us feeling normal again.

And many readers had something to say when I asked What Your Ideal Writing Teacher was. Writing teachers have a lot to keep in mind when preserving a structured classroom while also encouraging creativity.

And plenty of Writerly Life regulars sounded off on my post How You're Sitting On Your Best Material. As it turns out, a lot of people had a similar experience to mine and found themselves unwilling to write about the exact aspect of their lives that would make the best story, purely because it is so emotional.

There's a lot going on at Writerly Life these days, and I wouldn't you to miss out. In another few weeks Blairhurley.com will cease to exist, and will forward to Writerly Life for a while; then it will become a more personalized profile page for my own work purposes. So act now!

Change your bookmarks to Writerlylife.com

Direct your feed reader to Writerly Life's RSS feed

And don't forget to check out Writerly Life on Twitter and Facebook!

Getting an Agent: Advice

I recently attended a very helpful seminar my university set up about the process of getting an agent. Agents have become more and more important to writers these days, especially as the model of the publishing-house editor has faded in presence. Publishing houses used to develop strong relationships between their writers and editors, having editors work closely with writers on their manuscripts; to a large extent, that responsibility has fallen to the agent. Now, publishing houses want more polished works, and it's up to the agent to work with the writer and polish that piece. It also means that a little more responsibility is with the writer; more polished works are expected. Here are a few lessons I learned about how to go forth on your agent quest.

Put your best foot forward.

That was lesson number one: show your absolute best work. If you're showing one story you like and one story that needs work and one story that you know is weak but you need a third story, you're not ready to submit. Agents see hundreds of pieces a week, and they need to know that you have more than one good story behind you. So edit, polish, and edit again. Show your absolute best work; don't hold anything in abeyance, because if you do, you'll never get the chance to show that piece that you've been saving that you think is your best.

Be creative! Be exciting!

Agents need to feel excited about the work they are representing. That means they will choose work that has something original in it, something they've never seen before, and that has a lot of life and vigor in it. A few pretty sentences aren't enough; they want to feel engaged and moved by the characters you create and the ideas and words on the page. When you've polished a few stories to death, spend some time thinking about whether these stories are just good copies of what you've read, or have something new to bring to the literary world.

Continue reading at Writerly Life...

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.

Continue reading at Writerly Life...