Creative Writing
Learn how to organize, plan and create your most engaging and compelling life story with the creative writing skills of bestselling fiction authors.
-
Description—How Much Is Too Much?
Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do. — Mark Twain What is Description? Merriam-Webster calls it “an act of describing, specifically: discourse intended to give a mental image of something experienced.” Or: “a statement or account giving the characteristics of someone or something, a descriptive statement or account.” Narrative (the events), and description (how the character experiences the events), are the glue that keeps your reader stuck in your story. If nothing much happens, if the character is not emotionally engaged, then neither will the reader be engaged. Why is Description Necessary? 1. Description is all about the strategic delivery of important…
-
Riding the Razor’s Edge
Recently a writer asked me this question: “How can I turn my ideas into fiction? My short stories tend to be small slice-of-life sorts of things.” This is something that I often run into in workshops and classes. People tell me they only write about true events. They don’t know how to stretch their imaginations to turn facts into stories. They’ve never learned the infinite possibilities behind that magical phrase, “What if?” To turn ideas into fiction, take your true-to-life story elements and take them as far into what-if as possible. The key to making a true story fictional is exaggeration. Make the events bigger than…
-
“High Concept” Stories
While researching the week’s topic for my seniors’ group, (“A Clever Idea”) I tripped over a phrase that is much revered in Hollywood — “High Concept”. Definition of “High Concept”High Concept is defined by Merriam-Webster as: having or exploiting elements (such as fast action, glamour, or suspense) that appeal to a wide audience. In essence, High Concept is: Premise-driven Suited for a wide audience Unique Immediately intriguing Premise: A High Concept story must have an intriguing protagonist with a challenging goal that is highly significant to him/her, and the outcome must have tremendous consequences for the protagonist and the world he/she lives in. Audience: High Concept stories must…
-
One Artist’s Journey
I like to call myself a recovering artist. I like this description because it has a certain curiosity-piquing je ne sais quoi and it references my lifelong addiction to art and creativity. It also raises the question of why anyone would voluntarily quit the enchanting life of an artist. Spoiler alert — doing shows all the time becomes increasingly physically demanding for an ageing painter. All those classy exhibitions certainly look glamorous on the outside, but behind the scenes, there’s a whole lot of grunt-work, and I was fed up with grunting. There’s a classic artist’s joke — Q. What’s the difference between an artist and a puppy? …
-
The Song of the Spoken Word
Music surrounds us. Throughout human history, it has played a big part in our communications. But only in the past 100 years has it been available to everyone all the time. Before this, only a few very wealthy patrons could enjoy music in their homes, and only if they knew how to perform, play an instrument or hire someone to play for them. Every religion has used music to praise a variety of gods, (entertainment being a large part of their attraction for the general populace), and indigenous peoples have all had their own styles of music, often used to communicate over long distances, to appease the spirits and to ward off…
-
Creative Writing, Productivity, Structure and Plotting, Theme, Purpose and Outcome, Training, Lessons
How to Focus your Blog Post
Start with the End in Mind Recently, a reader asked me, “How do you write a story with the end in mind? How do you know what the end is before it’s written?” He was responding to a blog post in which I wrote about using constraints to spark creativity. One of the points I made was: “Writing with the end in mind applies especially to writing memoirs. When you first apply a life lesson, a theme, a psychological or theoretical point to the memoir as its raison d’être, you don’t need to think about everything that doesn’t fit the point. “But if you don’t…
-
Creative Writing, Organization and Research, Productivity, Prompts, Structure and Plotting, Theme, Purpose and Outcome
Less Is More
This morning, I went into my writing group completely unprepared to write. I had to show up at 11:00 a.m. and I’d been doing something else when the timer startled me with its petulant beeping, reminding me to get online immediately, if not sooner! Now, most times, when I go into the group, I know what I’m going to write — at least I have some idea or framework for the words I’ll be putting down — but for some reason, this morning I had completely forgotten that I had to write this blog post, so when one of my writer friends asked me what I’d be working…
-
Ground your Reader with Sensory Description
We all know that it’s important to immerse our readers in our story in order that they experience it fully, but how do we do that? “Show, Don’t Tell” is a truism that writers cannot avoid. We hear it everywhere, but what does it mean; how does it work? Engage your reader, say all the great writers; readers must lose themselves in the story. But how can we do this as writers ourselves when we don’t know how our favourite authors have done it for us as readers? One way, (though not the only way) is through clear sensory description. If we remember that a story should always…
-
The Evils of Comparison
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ― Oscar Wilde The saints are the sinners who keep on trying. — Robert Louis Stevenson Do you think you’re a crappy writer? Why do you think that? Did someone tell you that your writing sucks? Where did this belief originate? Whose voice do you hear in your head? Was it a teacher in the third grade or the fifth or the tenth, telling you that you’re not good enough to be a writer? I call bullshit! You’re not being fair to yourself — You’d never ask a child to paint like Rembrandt, dance like Nureyev, or sing like Pavarotti,…
-
Creative Writing, Organization and Research, Point of View and Character Development, Productivity, Prompts, Theme, Purpose and Outcome, Thoughts, Opinions and Philosophical Discussions, Training, Lessons
Questions and Answers
How NOT To Write Your Memoir Most people, when they start to write their memoirs, think they have to stick strictly to the facts, that their story has to be a list of the things they did, in the order that they did them. This simply isn’t true. It leads to the belief that they have to write their entire history — an autobiography, which, for most people is messy, disconnected and hard to follow. This means that they end up with a list of dry, dull facts, like some kind of desiccated checklist that may reflect the events of their lives, but doesn’t say much about…