I Was Totally Impressed.

I just started to teach a creative writing class in which my students are all teenagers. The workshops I give are normally for adult writers, people seeking publications, those with a bit of, well, life experience. So when I took on the adolescent set, I was a little nervous about what to expect.

Let me just say...I am so impressed. Not only by their passion for writing which, lets face it, is rare, but also for their willingness to share it. I also love the angst.  You know, how everything and every moment could lead to disaster or life changing triumph?  Because, well, at that age its kinda true.

The late adolescence to early adulthood is a critical decade. Decisions you make now will most assuredly affect your future.  Maybe not what to wear, but certainly who you spend time with, and what you do with that time could be what sets the events in your life in motion.

To that end, I truly love reading the free writes of my students. They are at once, noir foreboding and bright eyed hopeful. Love and loss intermingle with possibility and the chance to get things right.  I am inspired by these writers.  Age-wise or not, it takes a strong person to delve into the emotional depths of story writing.

It makes me think back to when I would scribble out scenes in my black and white composition book instead of taking Biology notes like I should have been. I had so much I wanted to get onto the page, so many scenes, so many connections to explore.  

What do you remember about your early days of writing? What would you tell your past self about writing?

Photo by Spree 2010 Photograph by Calsidyrose

Killer Geisha with Knife Fans

Photograph by JackiePix

I took a writing class a few years back and our teacher had us do a weird mind game to get us thinking about our plot threads.  He put a bunch of random situations in a basket and we had to draw two out. Now the situations were not similar in any way.

For instance I got: A boy gets stabbed in an empty lot and The villain's dollar bill was on fire. 

This in and of itself can be a great prompt, but he added a genre to it. So he gave us either fantasy or science fiction or what not. What was great about this type of prompt was that it corralled the action, but left the circumstance wide open.  If you've read any of my blogfest entries in the past, you'll know that I actually used this years later in a novel I finished a few months ago.

He also had us take well known passages from famous books and turn them into sarcastic rants. For instance, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's love poem to Robert; How Do I Love Thee -- you know the one where she counts the ways, is actually quite funny when you put a different spin on it.

Photograph by Klearchos Kapoutsis

One of my favorite things was our "Cool Stuff That Never Happens" notebooks. Its where we write down really strange scenarios that we've seen in movies and read in books.  Things like a dirigible chase or swimming under an iceberg's craggy underbelly.  I have over a hundred such scenes, my personal favorites include running ahead of imploding catacombs and killer Geisha's with knife fans.  That always makes me laugh.

The point was to get you thinking outside of the normal action scenes. How might a car chase look with crappy cars or while running out of gas? What about a villain with an accent so terrible that you can't understand his threats and he ends up pantomiming?  Original ideas can come from simply asking yourself...what if?

I came away from the class feeling like I'd grown creatively because he taught us that thinking outside of the box wasn't really all that hard. If I could do it, then so can you.  Tell me...what kinds of mental exercises do you do to get the creative juices flowing?

Until next time...Go Write!

R is for Redirect

A few years ago, I took a writing class taught by a guy who wrote teleplays. He worked on cop dramas and was quite successful despite the grueling demand for 20-26 episodes all requiring a fully formed story.

One thing he used to say was that there was no such thing as 'Writer's Block', just wrong turns. He said that if you are stuck in a story, or novel, or play...that the best thing to do is to go back to the section where things were flowing. Redirect your thoughts from making it work…to finding out why its not.

When did the writing transition easily from head to hands to paper? What scene were you writing when you were in, 'The Zone'? Chances are, the very next section is where you went wrong.

I took his advice with a grain of salt. After all, he only wrote hour-long episodes and I wrote 400+ pages...yet I've found through several books, that his advice was sound. Whenever I get stuck I go back to when it was good, and I usually find a misstep right after.

Did the hero and heroine reconcile too quickly? Was the dialogue unfinished...or revealed too much too soon? Did the decision to kill off a character or push them into the background hurt the flow? How about the characters, did I write them against personality or motivation and their actions don’t ring true?

Another trick he gave to us was to redirect our thoughts by working on something completely different. I usually have two or more novels in varying stages going at the same time. Sometimes all it takes is to redirect my conscious gears on one thing so that my subconscious percolates.

What about you? Do you have any tricks for redirecting a project that is stuck or feels wrong? I’d love to hear about it. Until next time…Go Write!

Photograph by Dano, Uploaded on September 11, 2006.