creative process

Sinking Into The Bog

March 8, 2019 By David Corbett 37 Comments

In my last post (“Inspired to Emulation—or Preparing to Jump“), I talked about The Rule of No Rules, and how reading other writers you admire will provide the best writing advice you will ever receive.

Not long after the post went up, one of my favorite novelists, Adrian McKinty—who writes brilliantly about Northern Ireland during the Troubles from the perspective of a Catholic detective serving in the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary—posted the following letter on Twitter. He composed it to an aspiring author who had asked his advice on this whole writing business. This is what Adrian wrote in response (the recipient’s name has been removed for the sake of privacy ):

I’m tempted to end this blog post here, because I couldn’t possibly say anything as perfect, but that would be cheating, or lazy, or both. So instead, I’m going to talk a little about my writing process, and in so doing I ironically intend to prove that Adrian is absolutely right—there are no rules. (Incidentally — for more on Adrian and his truly wonderful books, visit his blog The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.)

[Read more…]

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The Benefits of Fan Fiction

October 6, 2018 By Jo Eberhardt 4 Comments

Over the last eight or nine months, I’ve spent a lot of time teaching creative writing to children. When I started, I found it a little frustrating that no matter what the prompt or lesson or skill development, almost every child in every class would start off with a Great New Idea, which promptly turned into fan fiction the moment their pen hit the paper.

What started as “a race car driver has to win his final race to save the world from aliens” quickly became Top Gear fan fiction.

What started as “a girl has to find magical mushrooms to defeat an evil monster” was suddenly set at Hogwarts.

I spent far too much of my time trying to figure out how to overcome this “problem”. And then it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t actually a problem at all.

In fact, writing fan fiction was incredibly beneficial to these kids. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to realise that writing fan fiction can be beneficial for anyone — whether you’re a brand new writer or a highly experienced one. [Read more…]

Go, Young Writer, Go!

August 27, 2016 By John Vorhaus

So it’s back-to-school time and right now my heart’s going out, as it does every year, to my youthful compatriots in creativity, earnest young strivers desperate to know that the writer’s path is one they can fruitfully walk. It’s so hard when you’re that age (okay, any age) and you yearn for a life of creative engagement but all these obstacles stand in your way. Can you make it pay? Can you meet others’ expectations (or silence their objections)? Can you stand before the world saying, “This is my voice! It means something to me and I want it to mean something to you!”? (Can you punctuate that last sentence correctly, ‘cause I’m not entirely sure that I have.)

For young people in thrall to such questions it’s a particularly knotty problem. Think of the burden they bear: completely creatively inflamed and pretty completely creatively disempowered. This is the lot of any high school or college student who is being channeled away from (or is self-channeling away from) the writer’s life or any other life of creative pursuit. That’s not what they want. They know it’s not what they want. They just don’t know if what they want is a realistic or viable option.

Let’s say that the writer’s life is a roll of the dice. I don’t personally think that it is; I think that choosing a life of the mind, any life of the mind, is about as sure a bet as you can make in life, in terms of happiness, fullfilment and getting down to the isness of it all. But that’s not how it looks to an earnest young writer. It looks like a big gamble, and what if it doesn’t pay off? That future has disastrophe written all over it.

How can we set that young person free?

There stands a writer, desperate to walk the writer’s path, and desperate to know that the path will be fruitful… successful. What can we say to that writer? Here’s what I’d say.

1/ The path is the path. You’ll either walk it or you won’t. But the decision to walk it – the simple act of saying, “I’m a writer” – opens every meaningful door. If you’re wondering whether you can be a writer, the words “I am a writer” are an epic expression of self-fulfilling prophecy. Say you are and you are.

2/ Get support on the path. Creative people ally themselves with creative people. Once you’re a writer you’re in community, and in community there is strength. So go ahead and self-define as a writer. Once you do that, you can go where the writers go, and discover that they’re just as insecure and crazy and hell-bent as you are. As a writer you’ll need that, so get it. [Read more…]

Increase Creativity with Random Elements

October 7, 2015 By Kathryn Craft

Our guest today is Kathryn Craft, the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her work as a freelance developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads writing workshops, and is a member of the Tall Poppy Writers.

After publishing two novels in two years, it may look like novel ideas spring forth like mint in my garden. They don’t. For one thing, both of those novels were the result of many years of thought and development. Secondly, my homeowner’s association doesn’t even approve of rapidly spreading plants. As I fumbled through seed packets looking for a way to grow my next novel, I wrote this post to remind myself of what worked for me in the past.”

Connect with Kathryn on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Increase Creativity with Random Elements

A car mechanic, a midwife, and a 13-year-old Girl Scout walk into a bar…

No, really. What are they doing there? Did they arrive together, and if so, why? If they met in the bar, why did they interact? What if they all spoke different languages? What if, while wrapped in their own concerns, each of them had been powerfully drawn to this place—what might each of them say or reveal?

[pullquote]Three unrelated elements created the alchemy that spawned both of my published novels.[/pullquote]

Such jokes always include a setting, a situation, and three disparate people whose reactions allow for just enough repetition to set up the final punch line. But tossing together similar random ingredients can also create fertile soil from which to grow a novel.

Three unrelated elements created the alchemy that spawned both of my published novels.

The Art of Falling was inspired by two situations and a trend:

A news article I read of a woman who walked away from a 14-story fall with only a broken arm
An anecdote I heard about a man with a never-say-die spirit whose body was failing from heart disease, and whose hospital roommate was a young man with a flagging spirit whose body would not succumb when he put his head in the oven, blinding him instead
Our society’s obsession with the body beautiful.

The Far End of Happy took shape from a memory, a novel structure, and a complicated relationship:

The true-life bones of my first husband’s suicide standoff
An idea to write a novel in a 12-hour structure
Thinking about how hard it would be for lifelong friends to protect their relationship when their children were divorcing each other.

[Read more…]

Five Things Painting Taught Me About Writing

September 6, 2015 By Guest

Melissa DeCarlo has worked as an artist, graphic designer, grant writer, and at one time (that time being when computers were the size of a refrigerator) a computer programmer. Born and raised in Oklahoma, she now lives in East Texas with her husband and a motley crew of rescue animals. Her first novel The Art of Crash Landing releases this week.

There was a time in my life when I became discouraged with writing, and so I stopped writing and turned to visual art. For seven years, painting and sculpting were my creative outlet. Eventually, I found my way back to writing and rarely make visual art anymore, but that time spent trying to communicate with paint and clay was an important part of my life.

Connect with Melissa on Facebook and Twitter.

Five Things Painting Taught Me About Writing

[pullquote]“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” — Kurt Vonnegut.[/pullquote]

Like everyone else, I’m a lot things: a writer, a spouse, a parent, a pet owner, an amateur artist, a reluctant doer of laundry and an enthusiastic eater of donuts. When faced with a stubborn piece of writing, I search through my collection of life-experiences for something to help me make sense of the world or at least the work before me. I don’t know that I’ve learned much from the laundry-doing or donut-eating, but there are a few things I learned from making visual art that have served me well as a writer.

Here are five things of those things.

“Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.” — Henry Fuseli

1-HenryFuseli — Henry Fuseli “Silence” 1799-1801

In art classes we were encouraged to keep things loose for as long as possible, to resist the urge to perfect one area before moving to the next. There’s just nothing quite like spending hours capturing every detail on an ear only to step back from the easel and realize it should have been placed a half-inch lower. Sure, I tackle a novel one chunk at a time, but I’m learning not to tighten up too early. With my last book I spent too long perfecting scenes that didn’t make it into the final manuscript. I’ll never forget a man I once met at a writer’s conference. He was excited about his novel’s perfect first chapter. At some point in our conversation it became clear that although he’d been working on it for five years, all he had was the first chapter. Remembering that guy still gives me chills. You know those scenes I had to cut from my novel? One was my first chapter. [Read more…]

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