Writing Without Writing

Sometimes our writing needs a new grove to it. Though we might not think of it, our hobbies and artistic exploration will help us with our writing goals and this week’s NaNo Prep: Develop a Story Idea. NaNo guest Chris Fordham holds us to a new light that our writing process could be more than writing.

Focusing all of your creative efforts into producing a long form piece of prose is certainly a good approach. Writing challenges such as NaNoWriMo encourage a surge in word processing activity to generate a new story, but is it the only way to write effectively? To constantly hammer the keys, to live and breathe the story in exclusivity?

One of the best lessons I took away from my university course on creative writing, was that being a big reader expands your abilities to weave a story. An avid reader has access to a wealth of examples of descriptive language, world-building, and dialogue beyond their own life experience. Whilst this is all absolutely true, and certainly, something I’d encourage, I wanted to write about another avenue to better writing. When it comes to my writing, I find it important to explore other creative mediums alongside my current long prose project. 

Making sketches or art of any quality (not necessarily needing to be a masterpiece), temporarily switches your mind off from the story. The reason this could be a good thing is that whilst the hand is guiding a pen or brush for a while, it is learning something about small details. When you’re making a picture, you are trying to interpret some idea or feeling about the subject. It is much like using words to do the same. If the picture you’re making is related to the story you’re writing, you may even reveal something of a character or scene to yourself that you were as yet unaware of or struggling to resolve. Photography too can be used in such a way. The majority of people will have access to some form of camera, probably used in the main for simple snapshots and selfies. Training your eye as an artistic photographer also gets you thinking about smaller details and how they all add up to a more complete whole.

Music and poetry are perhaps media more easily relatable to using words. Composing a song or working within an unfamiliar poetic form or rhyming scheme forces some interesting wordplay. You can learn something from writing a lyric to a tune, even rewriting the words to an existing song. Cadence is pivotal in music and a component of great poetry; it simply describes the flow or rhythm present in a verse. There is no reason why lines of a story can’t be written within the structures of a poem. Consider a lyrical ballad such as “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe, or the songs of Bob Dylan, they are stories but set to a rhythm, stories with a beat to them that moves beneath the sounds themselves. Some of Virginia Woolf’s writings are described as prose poems and exercise this lyricality well. Removing the stanza line breaks doesn’t break the rhythm.

There is a multitude of other hobbies and interests out there that help train your brain to look at things differently. What I’m saying here is that your word count could benefit from you stepping back and remembering your other hobbies. A thousand words can be great or they can be filler depending on their content. Sometimes the exact same subject matter or dialogue can be conveyed in a lot fewer, paced, and placed sounds. Whether the words deeply explore intricate but relevant detail or pack a weighty punch in shorter, more poetic lines, the influence of these other media may play a role in finding them.

Chris Fordham is a jack of all trades, master of none in terms of creativity, mainly focusing his efforts as a musician in a number of projects around Northampton, UK. Chris dabbles in writing poetry and prose. He studied creative writing and philosophy at the University of Northampton. In his spare time he also takes photographs, sketches and paints with watercolour. He’s taken part in the November NaNoWriMo five times, successfully completing it within the challenge deadline on three occasions.

Top Photo by  Gabriel Gurrola  on  Unsplash