At The Write Practice, we publish a new article each day designed to help writers tackle one part of their writing journey, from generating ideas to grammar to writing and publishing your first book. Each article has a short practice exercise at the end to help you immediately put your learning to use.
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Close your eyes and imagine you’re walking through the streets on a foggy day. The fog is so thick that you can’t see anything around you—just your feet on the pavement and the dull gray tint to the haze.
You can hear your feet walking along, and you detect distant voices. Are they calling out to you?
Because I am.
Here’s what happens: You get an idea for a story, you start writing, maybe you work on an outline, and then… you stare, for long periods of time, at nothing in particular, until bystanders begin to worry about your emotional health.
Have you ever considered writing haiku? What can you gain from practicing this lovely craft?
Haiku or ‘exotic verse’, as some prefer to call it, dates back to 16th century Japan, though in the English-speaking world it has only been present for the last 130 years or so. It’s increasingly building up interest in the West, thus nowadays haiku is the most popular form of poetry on the web.
How to define it?
I always hated the whole idea that something as inherently artistic and, well, instinctive as writing fiction could (or, worse, should) be forced to adhere to structure. The notion is so non-intuitive as to be dumb.
Structure = formula = cliché = what’s-the-point?
No way I was going to try to stuff my creativity into the strait jacket of a preset structure created by some tweed-jacketed nincompoop out there in literary land.
Needless to say, I resisted the whole notion of structure for years.
And then, one day, I actually learned what structure was.
People read books for the stories, but it’s the characters they fall in love with. Audiences particularly seem to enjoy pairs of characters: Romeo and Juliet, Kirk and Spock, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, Watson and Holmes, John Paul White and Joy Williams.
When developing loveable characters (or hateable characters), storytellers have two primary methods of characterization: what a character does and every other character in a story.
The foil, in particular, is effective at breathing characters to life. This device in use since God made a bet with Lucifer in the Book of Job, and it shows up in many of the most popular stories today.
What is a foil and how can you use them in your stories?
Two simple things required of all writers in order to find their voice.
It’s funny what we can learn about writing from other, unrelated activities. For example, I’ve found that canoeing, shopping and learning to play the piano have all informed my writing practice. But little else in my life has taught me as much about writing as giving birth to triplets, twenty years ago.
You can milk the extraordinary out of the ordinary— the details of everyday life are a gold mine waiting to be harvested for your writing. All you need to do is pay attention and put your life under a microscope and express it.
Here are just a few ways to get started.
I just released my very first book, called Packing Light: Thoughts on Living Life with Less Baggage, and the whole experience has been a huge learning curve for me. Writing the book was of course difficult in itself, but one of the most shocking parts of the process for me has been how much writing there still is to be done, even after the book is finished.
There are guest posts and articles and content for the book’s website and content for my own website — all of which (honestly) seem to be saying the same thing.
Sometimes it feels like the subject is getting tired, and my writing is falling flat.
Sometimes I feel more “blocked” now than I did when I was writing the manuscript.
I recently finished reading the Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions. It fascinated me in countless ways: the style uniqueness, easy flow, ideas represented, underlying themes, references. What’s so special about it? Well, it’s an allegorical story about what could happen if people suddenly stopped dying. Straight and simple, and yet complicated.
An allegory is a literary genre concerned about principals and ideas represented abstractly. So how do you go about it? Consider three basic steps towards writing one.