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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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?
Quick. Think about your favorite writer. Imagine your favorite story by that person.
How has that story influenced you? Do you see traces of that work showing up in your own writing?
Today, I’m heading to Telluride, Colorado, for the annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival. My roommates and I bought tickets way back in December, and six months later, the time has come for us to load our gear up and drive the 7-9 hours into the mountains for four days of fun and banjos. We’ve been looking forward to this festival for a long time, and it’s finally arrived. You could say that we’re anxious to get to Telluride.
You could say that, but you’d be mostly wrong.
This month, twenty-four writers submitted to our Summer Solstice writing contest. We only gave you a week to craft a story, and you responded beautifully. Thank you for trusting us with your stories, and that you for writing, for adding meaning to our lives and the lives of others. We hope you had fun doing it.
Now, to the winner.
To find your voice, you have to take on the voices of others.
For example, here’s a brief history lesson on copying.
Steven Pressfield, when he was first starting out, typed out pages and pages of Hemingway just to get a sense of his pacing, his storytelling, and his voice. He copied him to get into his head and understand how he constructed sentences, and how each sentence related to the ones around it.
“A human being is a deciding being,” said Victor Frankl.
My dad and I have been talking about his novel. It’s a fantasy novel that takes place in a mythical, magical realm. The story involves love, intrigue, and war. I actually believe it has a lot of potential.
The problem is, it’s 650 typed, double-spaced pages. That’s a long novel!
From San Antonio to Houston we talked through the plot, and it wasn’t until we were almost there that I realized the problem.
His hero didn’t make any decisions.
Pixar tells perfect stories. Teams of writers spend years writing them, rewriting them, and rewriting them again. They are perfectionists of story.
That’s why I was so excited when my friend Brandon Clements sent me this amazing list of storytelling rules from the writers at Pixar. I picked out this one that provides a simple, interesting story structure:
#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
Sounds like a good place to start!
I love grammar. (This is surprising to exactly no one at this point, right?) But we're taking a timeout from grammar this week to talk about spelling. The topic: when "i" comes before "e". It seems like that's the most common trip-up in the English language today. You...
Of the twenty best short stories in the 2011 Best American Short Stories, half of them involved a character dying.
Think about your favorites novels or films? How many of them involve a death?
Of the thirteen books nominated to the 2011 Booker Prize longlist, every single one involved the theme of death.