Maggie Stiefvater's Blog: Maggie Stiefvater, page 8
June 15, 2019
June 13, 2019
WRITER PEOPLE
Want to play a writerly game with me this month? I’m leading a project on @hitrecord with @hitrecordjoe and it’s all about fearless storytelling, practicing unlocking ideas, and learning how story-writing can be a collaborative game.
The first step is incredibly easy. All you have to do to start is to head to the site and write about a memory of yours that you would hate to lose. A happy one, a sad one, a memory that made you who you are, a memory that keeps you from being someone you hate.
Why’d I pick that opening prompt? It’s not just busywork. Even though I write novels with a ton of fantasy elements, my novels still have to feel inherently true. If there’s not a solid heartbeat of emotional honesty beneath all the magic, readers won’t bother getting emotionally invested themselves.
Every human is a product of their experience, either running from or running to the influences that shaped them, and therefore, so is every character. The more truthful and real-life you make that emotional experience, the more readers will believe it. The more human you make your characters, the more readers will be willing to follow them anywhere.
So this prompt — what’s a memory you’d hate to lose? Well! What better way to ask writers to practice emotional honesty than by asking them to dig into their own past and ask the hard question: what has made me who I am? What would I hate to lose?
The group nature of this project is going to be a lot of fun later, but it’s going to be cool even in these opening stages, because we’re all going to have a front row seat to the kinds of memories that all sorts of people find important. One of the most crucial things we can do as both writers and humans is learn what about our own emotional experience is exclusive to us, and learn to put ourselves in other people’s shoes instead, and the more folks who participate in this prompt, the more pairs of shoes we’re gonna see filled.
It’s going to be fun.
See you over there for this first step, right?
Hi guys! Day two of the project, and we’ve got a lot of wonderful contributions.
This past year I did a seminar series — ten seminars, twelve-hundred students - on writing. Four hours on how to make the abstract (your story) concrete (on paper). One of the reasons why it’s challenging to teach novel-writing is that that process is different for everyone.
Some people need a lot of pre-planning in the plot department, others in character, others in mood, word choice, structure, etc, etc, etc. For others, planning too much in any of these departments will ruin the “game” of it, ruining the fun of exploration.
It’s a process that is so individual that it’s not exactly teachable … but it is LEARNable. It’s a skill, getting ideas from head to paper, that you get better at the more you practice it.
So when HITRECORD asked me if I wanted to lead a writing project, I knew that was one of the things I wanted to work on. Leaning hard on the skill of what each writer needs individually to story-make. This first exercise — write a memory of yours that you’d hate to lose — is designed to test writers in all the ways they’ll need later. It looks simple! After all, we all have memories! Just pick one! Write exactly what happened! Etc.!
But when you’re choosing a memory that you wouldn’t want to lose because it made you who you are or because it’s better than any other memory you have, you’re practicing imposing story structure onto chaos. You’re prioritizing events and memories in your life, which is exactly what you have to do again and again when writing a novel. You’re doing the heavy lifting of beginning/middle/end.
You’re also doing the hard work of building character. We’ve built characters from origin stories for as long as we’ve been telling stories about humans, but real people are complicated and have many origin stories every year, month, day.
The reality is that any minute of any day could be the beginning of a story, but you’re practicing picking just one and living with it as your beginning. That’s story-telling gold, folks. That’s a huge hurdle. The more you practice that, the easier your story-writing will come.
Pursuit - A 4K storm time-lapse film
Pursuit - A 4K storm time-lapse film
WRITER PEOPLE
Want to play a writerly game with me this month? I’m leading a project on @hitrecord with @hitrecordjoe and it’s all about fearless storytelling, practicing unlocking ideas, and learning how story-writing can be a collaborative game.
The first step is incredibly easy. All you have to do to start is to head to the site and write about a memory of yours that you would hate to lose. A happy one, a sad one, a memory that made you who you are, a memory that keeps you from being someone you hate.
Why’d I pick that opening prompt? It’s not just busywork. Even though I write novels with a ton of fantasy elements, my novels still have to feel inherently true. If there’s not a solid heartbeat of emotional honesty beneath all the magic, readers won’t bother getting emotionally invested themselves.
Every human is a product of their experience, either running from or running to the influences that shaped them, and therefore, so is every character. The more truthful and real-life you make that emotional experience, the more readers will believe it. The more human you make your characters, the more readers will be willing to follow them anywhere.
So this prompt — what’s a memory you’d hate to lose? Well! What better way to ask writers to practice emotional honesty than by asking them to dig into their own past and ask the hard question: what has made me who I am? What would I hate to lose?
The group nature of this project is going to be a lot of fun later, but it’s going to be cool even in these opening stages, because we’re all going to have a front row seat to the kinds of memories that all sorts of people find important. One of the most crucial things we can do as both writers and humans is learn what about our own emotional experience is exclusive to us, and learn to put ourselves in other people’s shoes instead, and the more folks who participate in this prompt, the more pairs of shoes we’re gonna see filled.
It’s going to be fun.
See you over there for this first step, right?
June 12, 2019
WRITER PEOPLE
Want to play a writerly game with me this month? I’m leading a project on @hitrecord with @hitrecordjoe and it’s all about fearless storytelling, practicing unlocking ideas, and learning how story-writing can be a collaborative game.
The first step is incredibly easy. All you have to do to start is to head to the site and write about a memory of yours that you would hate to lose. A happy one, a sad one, a memory that made you who you are, a memory that keeps you from being someone you hate.
Why’d I pick that opening prompt? It’s not just busywork. Even though I write novels with a ton of fantasy elements, my novels still have to feel inherently true. If there’s not a solid heartbeat of emotional honesty beneath all the magic, readers won’t bother getting emotionally invested themselves.
Every human is a product of their experience, either running from or running to the influences that shaped them, and therefore, so is every character. The more truthful and real-life you make that emotional experience, the more readers will believe it. The more human you make your characters, the more readers will be willing to follow them anywhere.
So this prompt — what’s a memory you’d hate to lose? Well! What better way to ask writers to practice emotional honesty than by asking them to dig into their own past and ask the hard question: what has made me who I am? What would I hate to lose?
The group nature of this project is going to be a lot of fun later, but it’s going to be cool even in these opening stages, because we’re all going to have a front row seat to the kinds of memories that all sorts of people find important. One of the most crucial things we can do as both writers and humans is learn what about our own emotional experience is exclusive to us, and learn to put ourselves in other people’s shoes instead, and the more folks who participate in this prompt, the more pairs of shoes we’re gonna see filled.
It’s going to be fun.
See you over there for this first step, right?
June 9, 2019
Lover got the gift of a summer trans-Canadian train journey (ish— Toronto to Vancouver) for...
Lover got the gift of a summer trans-Canadian train journey (ish— Toronto to Vancouver) for Christmas last year and this morning, we just got off the train after days and days of train travel. It was strange, marvelous, otherworldly, slow, luxurious to be on a train for so long, much of it without WiFi or cell signal. The folks in our train cars became recurring characters in each other’s lives - the temporary sitcom of the railway. I wrote, read, played cards, stared out the window at the awesome unending landscape. Spotted: two bears, two rainbows, one vacation. Unforgettable.
CALL DOWN THE HAWK: EXCERPT REVEAL
Thanks to the incredible power of The Raven Cycle fandom, we can now exclusively reveal the first 8 chapters of CALL DOWN THE HAWK!
Are you ready?
Call Down the Hawk Exclusive Excerpt by I Read YA on Scribd
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Lover: ah, yes, here we are, in Vancouver
me: ah, yes, Henry's city
June 8, 2019
I have actually decided the most annoying part about drawing while traveling is non electric pencil...
I have actually decided the most annoying part about drawing while traveling is non electric pencil sharpeners.
Maggie Stiefvater
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