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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To write fiction, you must develop your capacity be empathetic. In fact, you could argue that empathy is synonymous with story.
Don’t believe me? Plug the word story for empathy into this list of definitions for empathy that I found on Wikipedia:
[Empathy] is what happens to us when we leave our own bodies…and find ourselves either momentarily or for a longer period of time in the mind of the other. We observe reality through her eyes, feel her emotions, share in her pain. –Khen Lampert
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have little to no tolerance for modern romantic comedies (unless they feature Paul Rudd). They have so pervaded our culture that we can predict plot points with ease within the first ten minutes of the movie. The person that the protagonist picks fights with will be the love interest. There will be a snarky best friend. There will be a hilarious misunderstanding that causes the love interest to ditch the protagonist, until the protagonist makes a grand romantic gesture that will cause all to be forgiven.
These worn-out tropes are known as clichés.
Once a month, we stop practicing and invite you to show off your best work.
Are you interested in being published (in print)? Would you like to get better at the writing craft by working with an editor? Do you enjoy a little friendly competition? And are you a fan of The Write Practice?
Then this writing contest might be for you.
Earlier that morning, the reigns jingled softly in my hands as we rode along a split-rail fence. A velvet breeze rustled the meadow. Prairie grass rose and fell, rose and fell as eight hooves rose and fell, rose and fell. We would talk occasionally, but never for very long. Cowboys don’t talk much, but that wasn’t the reason why. I didn’t know the reason why.
In the spring of 1965, Bob Dylan was finished, says Jonah Lehrer in his incredible book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. He wanted nothing more to do with the music business. He had just finished an exhausting six month tour. He never wanted to play any of the songs he had become famous for again—songs like “Blowing in the Wine” and “The Times They Are a Changing.” He told his manager he was buying a cabin in upstate New York, was quitting the music business, and was “going to become a painter and a novelist.”
He was only there for a few days when he met what he called the “Ghost.” An “uncontrollable urge” to write came over him, and he basically word vomited into his notebook.
Four weeks later, he and his band were in the recording studio, and after four takes they recorded “Like a Rolling Stone,” the song that would change Rock and Roll forever.
Personally, I can relate to Dylan’s experience. Can’t you?
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been struggling to finish a short story. For weeks, I’ve been wrestling with this story and not getting very far. It didn’t feel as much like writer’s block as life block.
And then Jeff told me this story, and said the secret of creativity is to relax. If you relax better, you’ll write better.
This is a guest post by Mariane Vest.
I recently read a book by Charles Baxter called The Art of Subtext – Beyond Plot. Subtext is what is not said, not told, but is implied.
Plot is a twisting bridge over a chasm, says Baxter, a chasm that, in my mind, contains the hauntings, the past, the subterranean, the things people either cannot or will not say, things that we are only partially aware of.
If you want to write a good (and publishable) short story, start by writing a balanced one. There are five elements of storytelling, and if you focus on one element too much your story can get off-kilter and topple.
These five elements are the building blocks of story, and they are:
I’ve been editing a short story for nearly three weeks and I’m stuck. When I was working on it the other day, I got so depressed I said, “I hate this. I never want to write short stories again. I never want to write fiction again. I suck at it too much.”
In other words, normal feelings when you have writer’s block.
Like so many writers, I am easily distracted by the internet. I’ll be writing away when I hit some kind of problem, and instead of sitting with the discomfort of the problem I shoot off and check my email, my facebook, my twitter account. Instead of wrestling with the difficult problem, I run off to find easy, mundane problems to solve.
Of course, this doesn’t work when you’re job is to solve those difficult problems.
What problems are you having writing shorting stories and getting them published? Where are you stuck? What are you having a hard time with?
