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It’s the Little Things
The Little Things — those happy little accidents that make our day, those niggling little worries that won’t leave us alone, those small accents that finish off an outfit to perfection. Little things: mosquitoes, engagement rings, snowflakes, blisters. But how important are they? It’s the little things that give us such satisfaction when we’re coming to the end of a big project. All the big stuff is done and we can simply have fun with it. Editing to find exactly the right words, the perfect turn of phrase, or getting the final catchlight in the eye of a painted portrait just the right size, colour and shape. And…
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Writing Memoirs as Therapy
One major difficulty we run into when we start writing our memoirs is an inability to face or process troubling emotions. When we write things down, naturally, we have to think about them, and most of us would prefer that they just go away. We try to avoid thinking about the painful, traumatic events in our lives, burying them deep down so that we won’t have to look at them. But there’s a problem with this particular coping mechanism. These hidden traumas can come back on us in all kinds of unexpected ways. Inhibition or suppression of emotions, traumatic events, or aspects of our identity can result in long-term, low-level…
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Showing Off
Entrepreneurs (and if we want to be published, we writers are all entrepreneurs aren’t we?) are often told, “Face your fear, get over yourself, just do it.” But it sometimes helps to look at the fear and figure out exactly what it is that we’re afraid of. Recently, I was challenged to post some of my own memoir pieces, short stories, here on my blog — in particular, a story about my short-lived career as a shoplifter at age 6. Immediately, I felt reluctant. I didn’t want to, not because I thought it wasn’t any good, but because I didn’t want to show off. Which is a…
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Perfectionism and Writer’s Block — It’s All About the Baby Steps, Baby!
This week, I’ve been trying to come up with a riveting blog post idea and I’ve spent nearly two hours dithering, avoiding the problem. Rather than picking one of the hundreds of topics I’ve collected for times like this, I logged onto Joseph Michaels’ UnChained Writers, my favourite online chat group for writers, where I knew I would find others who’d understand and commiserate when I whined and complained about how stuck I was feeling. “Why do we do that to ourselves?” I said, and gave myself a little pep talk…“Okay, goofball! Just pick one and run with it. Something will come out of it, even if it’s not…
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Emotional Significance
or — How to Manipulate Your Reader’s Feelings Over many decades of reading, I’ve come to realize that one of the most powerful things a writer can do to keep a reader glued to the page is to create a deep yearning to be in the story and experience the emotions that the story’s characters feel. Running like an underground river beneath the needs and desires of the characters we create is the reader’s need for something only the character’s experience can provide. We read in order to become a part of the story world, to escape the everyday and immerse ourselves in an environment that satisfies something we…
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Coincidence
Deus Ex Machina Last week’s post pointed out that little coincidental changes can alter the entire trajectory of a story. But at what point does coincidence become “deus ex machina” — defined by the Oxford dictionary as, “an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel”? The key here is the word “contrived”. Last week, I said, “Our lives hinge on these coincidences.” But herein lies a problem for writers. We can’t use them. We can’t dump a convenient coincidence into our story whenever we need something to change. We can’t simply insert a character or…
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Change It Up!
This article comes out of a conversation I had with a writer who couldn’t decide what should go into two related scenes: Dor: I’ve got two scenes fighting with each other. So not nice! Bev: What’s the key point in each scene? How can you differentiate the scenes to accentuate the point? Dor: It’s a sequence of two scenes as a big storm is about to hit. So I’m mostly combing for timeline consistency. Two characters, one makes a suggestion and the other resists. Then in the second scene (a few beats later in the time line) the other character takes the bait and goes overboard with the suggestion.…
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Theme Rules Everything
Figuring out the theme of your memoir can feel like catching a greased piglet, partly because of the confusing variety of terminology that refers to themes in storytelling. It might help to explain the difference between several different terms that are used to describe this notoriously difficult-to-grasp subject: • Thematic Premise — Your plot. Some human quality, activity or character trait leads (or does not lead) to a particular inevitable conclusion. Based on core values and beliefs, the premise can be expressed as an “elevator pitch” that includes character, the basic story idea and what’s at stake. • Thematic Statement — Your message. A thematic statement is a simple, powerful…
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Creative Writing, Organization and Research, Point of View and Character Development, Structure and Plotting, Training, Lessons
Cause and Effect
One of the most effective ways to create a compelling plotline with a strong narrative drive is to make sure your cause and effect chain remains unbroken. What do I mean by the cause and effect chain? In stories, as in life, things happen because other things happen. If you fall down, you skin your knee. Your knee would not be injured if you hadn’t fallen down. That’s cause and effect. In stories, cause and effect are a kind of glue that holds your story together. Without it, your story is merely a collection of random incidents and your reader eventually becomes bored because things happen for…
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Repeat After Me…
The Power of Focus in Writing Too much repetition is bad, except when it’s not. Too much detail is bad, except when it’s not. So, what do I mean by that? Often, we weaken our writing by repeating words and phrases without being consciously aware that we’re doing so, but the proper use of repetition can help strengthen our writing, give it more impact and make it more memorable. The same is true for unnecessarily detailed descriptions. There’s a time and place for both of these techniques when we use them to focus our readers’ attention on something in the narrative. In our brain, we have…
