Category Archives: Technique

Why I Love Writing Prompts

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For this trimester’s activity period I am leading a fiction writing workshop. Five girls, one boy, and one teacher are joining me in time to write every week. We’ve decided that I will bring writing prompts, but if people are inspired to write something else, that’s okay, too. “That’s okay, that’ll work, whatever you need,” is sort of the unofficial motto of the group. Unofficial in the sense that I just made it up right now, but I promise you, it’s accurate.

Today because it was gorgeous, we wrote outside (where I was attacked by a spider and its web, but that’s another story), and I prepared two possible sunny day writing prompts.

1. Start with this line I/He/She was sitting outside in her hammock, sipping on a lemonade when the strangest thing happened.

2. Almost everybody loves a sunny day, but there are some who prefer rainy, overcast days. Who are those people and what do they have against the sun. (Adapted from writingforward.com by Melissa Donovan)

The first brought on a fantastically imaginative piece by one girl, which she accurately labeled “satirically morbid” and included a drawing.

I chose to start with the second and here’s what I wrote, completely unedited:

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No One Way to Do It

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In the class I am taking about teaching writing, I am learning a tremendous amount. My classmates are all fellow-teachers and we all share strategies that have worked for us in teaching writing. One technique that has come up time and time again is the idea of reinforcing writing strategies by saying, “That’s the way professional writers do it.”

Whenever I see this, I think, without any sarcasm, “Really? There’s a way?” I get a little jolt and think that if I could just be let in on the secret, it would make this whole writing thing a lot easier. I am not exaggerating when I say that my heart beats a little faster at this prospect.

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“Craft is Power”

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A perennial question for writers is “What advice do you have for aspiring writers?” I think people are often looking for practical answers, perhaps a checklist that will lead directly to publication. In part because there is no such path, writers’ answers tend to be more big-picture. My standard answer: “Read a lot, travel as much as you can, and just sit down and write.”

The last one, just sit down and write, was instilled in my by a childhood friend who was a family friend of legendary writing teacher Donald Murray. Writing doesn’t come like magical butterflies sprinkling pixie dust on you. If there is such a thing as muse, she is fickle, and likes to be worshiped often: you show your devotion by sitting down and writing and then maybe, maybe, you will get some inspiration.

Another fantastic writing teacher, Monica Wood, presents a slight variation in her essay “Learning From Goldilocks” in Teaching the Neglected “R”, the anthology I am reading for my graduate class. (For reactions to other pieces in this book see Great Beginnings and Emphatic Implicitness.)

. . . you can’t make a body of work out of happy accidents. Sooner or later you have to burrow deep into craft and tunnel through the mud just like every exhausted scribe who ever preceded you. Craft is power . . .

This passage resonates with me first and foremost because it captures the fact that writing is work. Sometimes it really feels like you’re going through a deep, dark, muddy tunnel, and you don’t know if you will get out. Sometimes you don’t. Second, it gives you a light to help you find your way: craft.

If you ever have a chance to take a workshop with Monica Wood, I recommend that you do so. I took a one night class with her this fall at The Telling Room, and found it completely empowering as a writer because what she teaches is craft: how to find the right word, how to start a story off in a powerful way, and, as in the case of this essay, how to structure a piece.

Every writer needs to develop his or her own tricks, or tool box if you prefer a less magical term. These are what you use to help yourself when you sit down and no words come, or the ones that do are awful. So no more sitting around waiting for the magical butterflies. Sit down, write, and power through the muck and mire. Who knows what you’ll find at the end of that tunnel?

Great Beginnings

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Doesn’t it seem like once you are thinking about something, it keeps popping up? For example, this past weekend I went to a writing retreat and the opening of Charlotte’s Web was brought up as an example of a great opening line: “‘Where is Papa going with that ax?’”

Then I was doing my reading for my course, the delightful essay “Twenty-First Century Revision: A Novel Approach in Three Acts with Three Points of View” by Barry Lane. In the essay, he quotes Scott Elledge’s biography of E.B. White, which offers some of White’s alternate first lines for the book.

“A barn can have a horse in it, a barn can have a cow in it.”
Or how about: “Charlotte was a big gray spider.”

The second is actually a straightforward and typical beginning of a children’s book: declarative and precise. It is also boring. As for the one about the barn, I have no idea where he was going with that.

The other two lines allow the reader to stop because they are completely contained statements of facts. But with Fern’s question, the reader is immediately drawn in. Where is he going?

Revision, folks, it’s what brought White to one of the most memorable first lines in children’s literature.

Learning from: Penelope

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image from IMDB.com

Over the weekend I saw the movie Penelope. I think this film may have flown under the radar, but I highly recommend you seek it out. I saw it streaming on the Wii with Netflix. Go watch it! You won’t regret it!

The movie has a very clear structure taken from fairy tales, and I thought it was something I could learn from and apply to my own writing. One of the first things the film does is set up the mythology of the story. Briefly: the Wilhern family is cursed so that the next girl born will be born with the face of a pig. The curse will only be broken when she finds one of her own kind who will promise to love her “till death do you part.”

So, right from the start, the audience knows what the obstacles are and what the characters want. Penelope (Christina Ricci) is born, she has a pig face, she grows up, her mother tries and tries and tries and tries to find someone to marry her. Enter James McAvoy.

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Emphatic Implictness

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I love school. Love it! And so, I’ve decided to go back. Right now I’m applying to UMaine’s Master of Education in Literacy with a Concentration in Writing and the Teaching of Writing (phew! It’s a mouthful, I know.) While I wait to see if I’m accepted, I’m taking my first course appropriately titled Writing and the Teaching of Writing with Dave Boardman. We’re two weeks in and already I’m thinking in new ways about working with student writers and my own writing.

We each chose a book about teaching writing, and I chose Teaching the Neglected R: Rethinking Writing Instruction in Secondary Classrooms edited by Thomas Newkirk and Richard Kent. This line from a piece by Tom Romano stuck out to me: “Emphatic implicitness is what artists strive for — to be clear and meaningful without being heavy handed.” He acknowledges that this may seem like an oxymoron, but maintains its truth, and I agree. Writing needs to be clear enough that the reader gets the message without being directly told. Otherwise, we might as well read a treatise of the author’s opinions.

When I work with student writers, I often see the emphatic but not the implicitness. They have set up a beautiful scenario with realistic characters and bring it to a logical conclusion. Then they tell us what it was all about. The last sentence or so may not be as clear as a moral, but it tells you in no uncertain terms what the author’s intent was. I always cross out that last line and write: “Trust your readers!”

Writers also need to trust their own writing. We need to believe that we’ve written a work that can stand on its own without authorial explication. It’s easy to see in others’ writing, and easy to point out, but can be harder to spot and avoid in one’s own work. Lately I’ve been working on books for younger readers, and I need to remind myself that they don’t want things spelled out for them any more than an adult or a teen would.

Even small moments need space to be implicit. While the girls laughed, she stuffed her belongings into her bag. Not, She stuffed her belongings into her bag, ignoring the other girls, because even though she said she didn’t care what they thought, she really did. If the world is real, the readers will be able to figure out why characters do what they do, and will find the reading more satisfying because they were given this chance.

I’m thinking of starting a wall of reminders to keep by my writing desk. Emphatic implicitness will certainly go on there.