Sep 27
As important as it is to get in the zone when you’re writing, it’s equally important to get out of your chair once in awhile and shake yourself up a bit.
That’s where the writer’s dance break comes in.
Even Daniel Pinkwater, author of “The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization,” took breaks from writing to stomp around outside. In describing how he wrote The Neddiad, Pinkwater said: Read more
Writing style is all about the decisions you make to express yourself on the page. Style is a blend of many elements, including sentence length, rhythm, and vocabulary. It has to do with how you apply description, dialogue, and characterization. It’s a reflection of your individuality.
Consider these guidelines as you develop your unique style:
Don’t purposely try to mimic another writer. You can’t develop your own style if you’re trying to imitate someone else’s. Read other writers and observe their style as inspiration, but don’t copy them.
Let your writing flow. Don’t overthink style. Just go with the flow. Style is a mix of conscious and unconscious decisions. Write naturally, letting your unique personality and instincts guide you. Read more
Why are some books so riveting, while others are just okay? What qualities of a story make you want to stay up all night reading even when you know the dreaded alarm will be going off at o’dark thirty?
If your goal is to write a page turner (and whose isn’t?), test your memoir, short story, or novel against these criteria to see how close you’ve come.
1. Create characters readers will care about. Grab your readers’ attention with fully developed characters. If readers are attached to the characters, empathize, or even hate a character, they’ll want to know what happens next.
2. Make sure that something important is at stake. What does your protagonist stand to lose or gain?
3. Start chapters with a sense of drama, mystery, or trouble. Create curiosity. It helps to start with your manuscript’s first line.
In “After the Game,” from Selected Stories, author Andre Dubus begins: “I wasn’t in the clubhouse when Joaquin Quintana went crazy.” Read more
Are you deep into revisions? Maybe you know you need to cut a few of your little darlings. Or maybe a few thousand? Whatever the case may be, here is one technique from Jane Yolen, the legendary children’s and young adult author.
Take a chapter of your manuscript and break it up into breath spaces as though it were a poem. Read more
Even though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, an incident as a teenaged babysitter taught me one of my first lessons about subtext and story.
I was babysitting a nine-year-old boy who was literally out of control, a human tornado. He wouldn’t listen. I had plenty of babysitting experience, but I’d never dealt with a child like this. At one point, he found a cigarette lighter and before I could grab it from him, he’d flicked it on and burned his hand.
Later that day, after I had gone home and was walking down the street with a friend, the boy’s mother drove by. She stopped and started screaming at me about her son’s injury. While it wasn’t good that he had hurt himself, her response was extreme for the superficial nature of the burn. I tried to explain how hard it was to manage him, but she just drove away. Read more
How well do you know your characters? If you’re stuck or blocked in your writing, it may be a signal that you have more to discover.
Speaking at a workshop sponsored by the Nevada chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Susan Brown, author of “Hugging the Rock” and several other children’s books, said when she gets blocked, it helps to learn more about her characters. That in turn helps her raise the stakes of her story.
Brown suggested these writing exercises:
Tip 1: Write letters to your characters and then have them write back.
Through letters, Brown has learned interesting nuances about her characters that led to new plot twists. Read more
I love it when I find another writer who has a ritual or a way of thinking about writing that I share. It’s one more way of feeling connected to a community. This week, I had one of those moments when I read an interview with writer John Reimringer.
In The Aroostook Review, the online literary journal at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, Reimringer speaks about the practice of writing, how he got into it, and his routines and rituals. One especially struck me because it’s a ritual I’ve done in the past with working out and one I now do with my writing practice.
I give myself a star for each day I write.
I like to use a calendar that shows a month and has big enough squares for the stars. Something about seeing those stars pushes me forward. I like to look back and see my writing history at a glance. If you post your calendar in a place where you work, it can even become a conversation starter. I’ve influenced more than one person to start marking their writing progress with stars. (It’s actually a good way to mark any progress toward a goal, not just writing.)
Reimringer and his wife, poet Katrina Vandenberg, do something similar. Read more
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