Julie Duffy's Blog, page 173

[Write On Wednesday] Unseasonal Valentine

The Prompt

Write A Valentine’s Story

I know, you think I’m crazy, right? But if you’re a sick as I am (already) of the Christmas music in the mall (it’s early NOVEMBER!) and the magazine articles about ‘holiday entertaining’, then why not strike back, by skipping the festive season altogether and writing a Valentine’s story?

The bonus here is that, should you happen to write a story draft that has promise, you’ll have plenty of time to polish it and submit it well before the Valentine’s magazine deadlines roll around (end of Nov/early Dec). If you’re more of the Do-It-Yourself-er, then you’ll still need time to polish, format and market your story before February strikes.

And if you’re just writing for fun, what could be better than letting your story take you away from the present day?

Tips

Put on some love songs and “think romantical thoughts”.
Try writing a love story with a twist. Everything gets kind of sickly sweet around Valentine’s Day. Write a story for the people who really NEED a love story that day! This might include revenge, someone asserting their independence, someone walking away from a relationship, or a good old-fashioned farce.
Ever watched a soppy movie or read a romance and hated the way it ended? Create some similar characters and give the story a better ending.
Remember that story comes from character. Know your character before you start writing — what does she want? What does she need? How are these different? That’s where your story happens.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Fool’s Errand

This week a major art discovery was made in Bavaria: a hoard of 1000+ art works (many by masters like Chagall and Renoir) was found in the apartment of the son of an art dealer.

These art works, it is thought, were ‘lost’ during WWII (i.e. looted, forced sales, etc.). 70 years on, many of these works must surely have been forgotten about entirely. For certain, many have never been seen by art historians. But there have been people who have pursued this type of art down through the decades since the war ended.

Which got me thinking. There have been many people who mourned, pursued and talked about this art down through the decades since the war ended. As time passed, they may have gone from sounding like crusaders to sounding like cranks. How must they have felt yesterday, when this hoard was revealed?

The Prompt

Write a story that features an obsessed character who is suddenly, unexpectedly vindicated.

Tips

The story can share the moment at which the vindication happens or it can happen afterwards (or perhaps even slightly before. Wouldn’t it be fun to let the reader see the vindication coming, but leave the story just before it does?)
Character is all in this story. It doesn’t really matter WHAT your character is obsessed with/paranoid about. The interesting parts happen in their interactions with the doubters and believers around them.
What would it do to a family, or a relationship, to have one member who was obsessed with an increasingly-outlandish idea through the years?
If you’re struggling for a topic, don’t forget the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination is coming up on Nov 23…

Go!

[Reading Room] Cretan Love Song by Jim Shepard

This story is a lovely illustration of how to take one of those factual tidbits we often run across and turn them into a compelling and short story. It’s also written in the second person.

The author starts by writing about the Santorini eruption that wiped out the Minoan civilization 1600 years ago. He starts with an almost clinical, scientific description of what you would have seen if you had been standing on a beach on Crete at the time of the eruption. He quickly begins to introduce descriptive and poetic elements, along with people and relationships. Before long, the ‘you’ of the story has a family, and an urgent desire to fulfill.

What started out as a remote, impersonal “Imagine if” story has quickly become a heart-wrenching race to the finish that has the reader rooting for the unnamed protagonist and ends with a huge compelling message for us all.

Shivers up the spine!

This Selected Shorts episode features a great short interview with Jim Shepard who explains how his obsession with the Santorini eruption turned into this beautiful, moving story (and how it helped him in his everyday life!)

[Reading Room] Subsoil by Nicholson Baker

This story was an absolute delight: an agricultural historian is putting off getting-down-to-work on his publication with one last research trip. Feeling restless with his usual accommodations, he tries a recommended ‘bed & breakfast’ for a change….and he gets it!

I like humor and I like twists (and I love The Twilight Zone), so I loved this story. It starts with a slow burn, but the details are so delightful that you can’t resist reading on to find out what this pompous little man and his odd new hosts get up to. I get the impression the author had some fun researching obscure agricultural equipment and skewering the academic propensity to obsess over minutiae, but he does both with a relatively light hand. It’s funny but not labored, and beneath it all the mystery ticks on.

The climax is surprising and then, once you’re in on the secret, the author lets you see the ending coming; lets you unwrap it along with him as it happens. Really, really satisfying. And a little bit evil.

[Reading Room] The Dome by Steven Millhauser

I’m not sure when this story was written so I’m not sure if it predates or post-dates other stories about cities within domes, but when a story is this well-written it hardly matters.

This story is fascinating in several ways. Firstly, the writing is just great. If you like language, and like a little humor in your stories, get a copy of this (you can find it at Selected Shorts, read by Alec Baldwin, who does a great job).

Second, it breaks rules — or at least bends them. I’m always reading that stories have to have a character and the character has to want something. This story does not seem (at first) to have a character. And it’s not at all clear who wants what. But it turns out that the ‘character’ could be said to be ‘humanity’. Later in the story it becomes clear that if there is a protagonist, it is the contemporary group of dome-dwelling humans of which the narrator is one.

But it’s refreshing to read something so engaging that breaks from expected patterns and still manages to hold the reader’s attention all the way through.

Steven Millhauser won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his novel Martin Dressler, which prompted publishers to bring some of his older story collections back into print. I’m off to see if I can get hold of some of them…

[Writing Prompt] Borrowed words

Today’s is a silly prompt designed to get you to lighten up about your writing.

One of the best ways to become blocked is to put pressure on yourself to write something good.

Today’s gift to you is a list if words it’s going to be very hard to turn into a good story.

So write something silly. Have some fun:

[Writing Prompt] Character Rampage

I was listening to a song I love this week. (“I Think Never Is Enough” by the Bare Naked Ladies).

In it, the protagonist is proudly telling us how he followed his own dreams rather than blindly going to college or backpacking through Europe or working in retail, like everyone else he knew (“I never worked a single day in retail/Telling people what they wanna hear/ Telling people anything to make a sale./ Eating in the food court/ With the old and the bored…”). I love it and want to play it to my nieces and nephew, my sons, everyone in their teens. I love his in-your-face arrogance. And then I started to wonder if the band ever performs this song now, and if, 20 years on, they’re ever faintly embarrassed by that arrogance. Even though it’s one of the things I love about the song…

And that got me thinking: one of the best things about being a writer is having an outlet for all those times you want to rant and rave unreasonably but can’t because you’re too damned polite.

 

The Prompt

Write a story about a character who says and does things you could never do/say.

Tips

Let them be as heroic/funny/romantic/angry/mean/bitter/vindictive as you like.
Don’t worry about making them rounded. This is a short story not a novel. You can give them one line where they move a cat out of harm’s way before nuking the city, to let us know there’s more in there than the pure character we’re seeing in this moment. This isn’t a novel. We don’t need to see much more than that.
Think of an issue that’s liable to set you off on a rant (it could be anything from a hole in your sock to the hole in the ozone layer, from apostrophes to healthcare, from sport to cell phone use) and think of a character who shares your position on that thing (or opposes it) to the extreme. Put him/her in a situation that’s going to get him riled up and start the story just after that has happened.
Don’t back off. Let them say all the things you never would. Remember, you don’t have to show this to anyone if you don’t want to (but I bet you’ll want to).

Go!

The One Thing You Must Do Before Taking Writing Advice

The problem with writing advice is that it all weighs the same.

You read four articles on character development and start to worry because vibrant characters don’t come easy to you.
Your favorite writing-blogger is having trouble with dialogue in her own fiction so she does a series on the importance of natural dialogue. Now you start to think worry that your high-fantasy characters’ dialogue isn’t naturalistic enough.
It’s coming up to NaNoWriMo, and everyone’s talking about outlining and sharing their own Type-A version of it, which makes you start to doubt that you could ever write a novel because…damn!

There is an abundance of wonderful advice about writing online. If you are ever having a problem in your writing it is easy to find five different polemics on that topic in as many seconds.

But if you’re not writing regularly, how do you know what advice YOU need hear?

Find Your Strengths, Work On Your Weaknesses

I had the pleasure recently of being able to ask the talented and prolific Chuck Wendig about his characters and how he makes them pop off the page.

His answer took me completely by surprise.

“I feel like voice is my strong suit,” he said, simply.

He went on to talk about other areas that he struggles with more — areas that need work in the rewrites — but this? It was the easy stuff for him.

A small, controlled explosion went off in my brain:

He’s just good at this stuff.

I don’t have to be as brilliant at characterization as him. Maybe I can’t be.

If I’m really, really good in some other area, maybe it’s OK if I focus on that.

This Is Not An Excuse

This is not at excuse to avoid learning about the craft. You do need to be proficient in all areas of writing.

But if your first draft is weak in one area (or several), don’t let it slow you down. Instead, play to your strengths. If you’re witty, play that up. If your wordplay makes people smile, go to town on it. If  you are all about the dialogue, get that down first.

Write a lot to discover your strong suit.
Play to those strengths.
Fix the rest in the rewrite.

 

Need help with the ‘write a lot’ part? Try these articles:

How To Become An Insanely Productive Writer

Delegate Your Way To Writing Success

Five Irresistible Writing Prompts

Need more help? Take a look at the Time To Write Workshop, The StoryADay Guide to Breaking Writers’ Block and the Warm Up Your Writing Home Study Course in The StoryADay Shop.

[Writing Prompt] Limit Yourself To 100 Words

One of the first internet-era writing challenges I ever attempted was over at 100words.net . The challenge was to write 100 words (exactly) every day for a month (I think the brain behind the idea originally did it for 100 days, but by the time I discovered the challenge it was a calendar month).

It was hard, but it was freeing too. And it was my experience with those limitations (and the rhythm of writing every day for a month) that set me thinking about my own StoryADay challenge, years later.

The Prompt

Write 100 words. Exactly 100.

Tips

It can be helpful to think of this as an exercise, not a story
Start with an experience of your own. As you whittle your words and ideas down to exactly 100, you will inevitably be creating fiction.
100 words isn’t much. You don’t have room for traditional story structure, or to worry about all those writing rules you’ve been working to absorb. Just write.
If you need a more specific prompt, write about something you did yesterday morning. Give me details, colors, emotion.

Go!

Oh, and thanks to everyone who left comments or got in touch about the five-a-week prompts in September. The deal was that someone who commented would win a copy of my Time To Write Workshop. And (drumroll please) the winner is: Sarah Cain!! (I used the random number generator at Random.org — and got ridiculously excited waiting for the winning number to appear! Congrats Sarah. Hope it helps!

Beginnings, Middles and Ends — Wrapping Up StoryADay September 2013

This week’s prompts took a structural approach to story. Each day we focused on element of story: the beginning of the middle, the real middle, the climax, the end and then we went back to look at the beginnings again.

This week, you should feel free to attempt a story a day, or work on the same story all week. You can even rewrite old stories paying particular attention to the structural element of the day.

Prompt 1 – Mess With Their Heads

Having worked on character (the real starting point of any story) last week, this prompt encouraged us to move quickly onto messing with them — creating the real beginning of the story.

Prompt 2 – Make It Even Worse

Ever got lost in the middle of a story? It happens all the time. One way to avoid the soggy midsection is to remember what your character wants and work on frustrating the more and more (and more).

Prompt 3 – The Bit Before The End

Now that it looks like all hope is lost, you can let your character fight back. Everything you’ve set up pays off now: it’s climax-time!

Prompt 4 – Writing A Strong Ending

It’s the end of September and time to look at the ends of your stories. We look at three different types of endings: when to use them and how not to screw them up.

Prompt 5 – Back To The Beginning

When you reach the end of any story, that’s the perfect time to go back and rewrite your first line…

 

Thanks for playing along during StoryADay September’s prompt-fest.

Don’t forget to sign up for news about the next proper StoryADay May challenge (which really is a Story A Day!).

If you need more writing prompts, bookmark this category. Come back as often as you need. You can also sign up for prompts by email every Wednesday and I’d love it if you’d play along by posting your short story here at the site each week and providing feedback for other people.

If you’re interested in investing in your writing development, sign up for the StoryADay Creativity Lab mailing list. I don’t mail to this list very often, but when I do it is with news about courses (mine and other people’s) and books, tools, workshops etc. that I think are worth your time and money as a developing writer. I’ll be posting details in this list first about the next Warm Up You Writing Live Sessions — a three-week workshop hosted by yours truly, with writing exercises, audio classes, online forums and one-to-one coaching. Don’t miss out!

Keep writing,

Julie

P.S. Don’t forget, everyone who comments this month will be entered in a drawing to win a free copy of the StoryADay Time To Write Workshop.