For every artist who struggles with transforming passion into actual and tangible, remember this:
There is no magic, no luck, no splash of momentary inspiration that will replace the call of the work in front of us.
We must be fully present in our practice.
How?
Not long ago in my writing career, my readership reached an all-time low. It was a pretty drastic drop. My writing was inconsistent, and so were my topics. I wasn’t giving anyone a reason to follow me. But even without the readers, I still had an urge to write.
It was then I made the mistake of making my writing about myself.
Foreshadowing is common enough in storytelling: the burning scar of Harry Potter, Peeta Mellark’s ability to frost cakes, all the hand motifs in Arrested Development, everything in LOST. A well-placed note of foreshadowing can come back to the reader as a smack on the head or a revelatory twist ending. One of the most well-known foreshadowing techniques gets its name from the playwright Anton Chekhov. He famously said that if there is a rifle onstage in the first act, then it absolutely must go off in the second or third act. If it’s not going to go off, it’s got no business being present.
This object, skill, or other source of foreshadowing is referred to as Chekhov’s gun.
When you’re only just starting out as a writer, there are so many questions to be considered before you even begin: what to write about, the genre, the style, how often you should practice, and many technical ones that keep piling up the more you actually involve in the craft of writing.
Those are things that inevitably hit everyone sooner or later, so the proliferation of writing tips and advice shouldn’t be surprising at all. Most of the literary masters have offered invaluable counsel on the matters. This wide range of writing tips is good because it means there’s a bigger chance that somebody will find another person to relate to.
Many of our favorite stories have an item that our heroes are attempting to retrieve. Sometimes that item has significance to the plot, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the titular lost ark ends up getting Indiana Jones out of a precarious situation. And sometimes the item is just an item that the heroes need to find because, well, something needs to run the plot of this thing.
In that case, the item is called a MacGuffin.
