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Friday, March 09, 2007

Time for Prompts!


Tell your internal editor to take a coffee break, then ask your muse to come in and chat for a little bit. Write for ten minutes without stopping, crossing out, backspacing, or otherwise editing yourself – and if no topics spring immediately to mind, try one of my prompts:

--Write about your favorite book store.
--What was your most memorable Valentine’s Day?
--Jackson didn’t think twice about walking down the alley. He took the smelly shortcut every day on his way to work. He was lost in thought when he heard the crash….
--If only I had ______, I would ______.
--Do your pets do anything odd or unusual?
--Write about your last shopping excursion.
--Tell us what you think of this quote about writing: “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ~Sylvia Plath
--Joshua couldn’t swim. He didn’t know the creek was only a foot deep, so when his brother pushed him into the water, Joshua thought….

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Photo Courtesy of Dain Hubley at http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Daino_16

Thursday, March 01, 2007

The Dark Side


My writing group has been talking about “the dark side” – that place where death, depression, chaos, and tears live. Can writers become stuck in the dark side? Conversely, what if you want to tell a dark story, but just can’t get there?

It’s easy to get stuck in the dark side because a wealth of material lives there. Our writerly instincts tell us the material is interesting: newspapers are full of tragic stories and murder mysteries are bestsellers. Good writing connects us with the emotions of shared existence – and pitch-perfect description is necessary for that connection. Tragedy can burn events into our minds, giving us vivid memories to work with. Writing’s therapeutic value is well-known and can draw us towards certain topics (Stephen King, for instance, wrote The Shining while battling alcohol addiction). For these and many other reasons, writers may submerge themselves in sinister or sad material. This can be exhausting work. What should a writer do if she’s tired of death and disaster? If you’d like to lighten your work, look for humor – it’s always there just under the surface of tragedy. Try another genre. Study authors doing lighter topics. Too often we label ourselves narrowly and hesitate to venture into new territory.

If you want to write darker material but hesitate to drop into the back alleys of your mind, take it slowly. When writing fiction, sinister characters almost always show up wearing a black hat. Just let them be themselves. Non-fiction can give you the benefit of a more objective stance, although even journalists become deeply affected by the topics they cover. Personal experience/memoir can be painful because you relive the experience to a degree. Every writer deals with this in her own way – when I wrote my memoir, I tackled the hardest material in small doses. Many people say they had to give themselves permission to feel (and suffer) the emotions of the past.

Some of us write about funerals, some about weddings. Both events resonate with us on several levels. Look closely and you’ll find both comedy and tragedy in both.

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Photo courtesy of Donna Louisa Mock at http://www.sxc.hu/profile/paleangel7