Karinwritesdangerously

“Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, but betwixt them both, they licked the platter clean!”

“I got a sense of the power of restraint from Hemingway, which is the smallest way to put it, because I got so much more than that from him. I learned the power of simple language in English. He showed what a powerful instrument English is if you keep the language simple, if you don’t use too many Latinate words.

“And from Faulkner, I learned the exact opposite, that excess can be thrilling, that ‘Don’t hold yourself in. Don’t rein yourself in. Go all the way. Go over the top, Overdo it.’ And between the two, it’s almost as if you’ve now been given your parameters. This is the best of one extreme and this is the best of another. And somewhere between the two you may be able to find your style in time to come.”
Norman Mailer

What an inspired idea — to pick two authors whose work you love with two very different styles and use them as the polestars for developing your own stylistic flair! When I think of two writers I’d recruit for this style-building strategy, Willa Cather and Charles Dickens spring to mind. 

Willa Cather is a writer with a spare, lean style that reminds me of Hemingway: Like him, the words she left unsaid often convey as much as those on the page: There’s enormous emotional power in her silences. In contrast, Charles Dickens seems to revel in “over the top” writing and in artistic flourishes that seem excessive — after all, he was paid by the word. And yet, the color and joy and pleasure on the page that I feel when I read one of his novels is what draws me to him.

If I were to pluck some magic from each of these writers to make my own, here’s what I’d do: From Willa, I’d take the emotional undertow she creates through language that is simple yet precise and evocative. And from Charles, I’d take his flair for character description and exuberance.

How about you? If you had to pick two authors, one “fat” and the other “lean” — which two would you pick and why? And what qualities might you borrow from each to craft your own unique style? Something to ponder and play with as we all write on!

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The great Alfred Hitchcock once said that a good story is “life with the dull parts taken out.” This holds true for dialogue as well. Sparkling, spot-on speech advances your plot and reveals more about your characters to readers. Helpful advice from writers and craft experts:

Elizabeth Bowen offered 7 tips:

1. Dialogue should be brief.
2. It should add to the reader’s present knowledge.
3. It should eliminate routine exchanges of ordinary conversation.
4. It should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.
5. It should keep the story moving forward.
6. It should reveal the speaker’s character, directly and indirectly.
7. It should show the relationships among the speakers.

“Every person in a conversation has an agenda; you need to know what each agenda is.”

“[Dialogue is] not the way we speak. Dialogue must appear realistic without being realistic. It’s not natural, but must suggest naturalness. It is speech that is distilled, refined, and controlled.”

“Don’t tag an adverbial clause depicting action to a line of dialogue. ‘I’ll get the door,’ she said as she crushed out her cigarette and stood.’ Either the behavior is important or it’s not. If it’s important, it should not be subordinated to a line of speech. It it’s not important, it gets cut. ‘I’ll get the door,” she said. She crushed out her cigarette and stood.’”

“We always speak with at least two languages, with our verbal utterances and our physical utterances (our body language), and they don’t have to be saying the same thing. In fact, it may be more interesting if they are not. Then there is immediate tension in the scene.”
John Dufresne, The Lie That Tells a Truth

“…novelists such as John O’Hara or Richard Price, who favor a lot of talk and render it variously and well, are like playwrights or…screenwriters of the page. Their own style is subservient to the sound of the characters’ talk.”
Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page

And two more dialogue tips:

“Dialogue is not just quotations. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a page and crossing of legs.
J Stern 

“Speak your dialogue out loud. If it sounds the way people talk, then write it down.”
Tom Clancy

Let’s strive to keep our exchanges on the page spare and spirited. as we all write on! 

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“Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.”
Sarah Bernhardt

Peak performance matters: To do our best work, we need to feel our best. Creating a healthy lifestyle is one of the best ways to keep our writing goals on track. A sports medicine consultant for elite athletes, recently shared three simple steps to stay healthy and strong:

Drink water: Staying hydrated boosts oxygen uptake in the body, which nourishes our cells and keeps us mentally sharp. When we’re dehydrated, we feel sluggish and even foggy. Nutritionists recommend drinking from 6 to 8 glasses of fluid a day — if 50% of that fluid is water, all the better. 

Keep moving: To stay heart healthy, we need to engage in aerobic activity for 30 to 40 minutes, 6 to 7 days a week. The options are far-ranging: taking a daily walk, jogging, swimming, tennis, bike riding. Just taking time each day to get moving can lower our cholesterol and keep us heart-healthy. What a simple step — and what a huge result!

Build strength: Along with aerobics, we need to stay flexible and strengthen our muscles. We can do this through band exercises, by using weight machines, or by working with free weights. Yoga or Pilates are also wonderful ways to boost both flexibility and strength.

Why not invest in yourself with a simple stay-strong program? Spending a little time and energy to figure out what works best you can make a big difference in our lives and our writing. Such simple steps to take to spark our creativity as we all write on!

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Breakage

by Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

“You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.”
John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck had a storied career. Best known for Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden, he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize. In the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review, he offered six writing tips:

1. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day — it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as quickly as possible and throw your whole story on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewriting in process is usually an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with the flow and rhythm, which can come only from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know, or an imagined person, and write to that one person.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you think you still want it — bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason that it gave trouble is that it doesn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of [the] drawing [you are trying to create].

6. If you are using dialogue — say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.”

Points to stoke our creativity as we all write on!

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karinwritesdangerously

“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
Yogi Berra

We all know the emotional satisfaction — the sigh of contentment we breathe — when we hit the last page of a book and feel that the ending was just right. Somehow, it seems inevitable — as if it was the only possible way the writer could wrap up the story.

And we’ve all had our share of disappointments — stories that fall off a cliff, and with a whimper, not a bang. These moments create not just disappointment, we can also feel cheated — as if an author swindled us into reading an entire tale without taking it to an responsibility for seeing that it came to a strong, emotionally satisfying conclusion. 

Welcome to the murky land of story endings — it’s not far from the rocky terrain of story beginnings. Both are equally challenging to write. but so important to readers. A writing coach offers six helpful tips on ending on a strong note:

1)  Create change: Make sure that your main character has gone through a transformation in the course of your narrative’s events. It can be subtle or substantial, but your character can’t be static — otherwise readers will feel that nothing meaningful has happened.

2)  Answer the question: Every story with narrative momentum poses an initial question or conflict. Make sure that the question is answered and/or the conflict
resolved in some form by the time the reader hits the last page.

3)  Tie it together: A story can have a number of “themes, subplots, and character arcs happening at once. But if they don’t feel meaningfully connected, then it comes across as random. Use the end to bring all those key threads together.”

4)  Deliver emotional impact: If you’ve created an appealing, believable set of characters and a change-stimulating conflict, then you’ve taken your readers on an emotional. “Now don’t let them off the emotional hook. Make sure that the ending delivers by offering up lasting emotional impact. Make readers cry, smile, laugh. Make them feel multiple things at once. Just make them feel.”

5)  Make sure the ending fits: Some authors who can’t figure out how to end their stories come up implausible, ill-fitting events that don’t require effort on the part of their characters or feel true to the spirit of the story. Avoid this approach!

6)  Take readers beyond “The End:” “The future of characters should be different from their past as a result of the story happenings. And while the future is indeed unknown, the general arc of the future should be intuited by readers.”

Engaging beginnings, emotional endings — just what the reader ordered. Write on!

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“Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”
Carl Jung

“All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.”
Alexander Woollcott

The Fun Zone—love that name—it’s a kid’s party place. And here’s one of the many things I love about writing: it’s the fun zone! Not always, but most of the time. I like to think of it as a form of play: The page is my sandbox, my pen is a shiny red shovel, and I dig around inside my head and gather piles of sand which eventually turn into a castle or a mountain or the Great Wall of China. Or whatever. You get the idea.

I know, I know. Today, you may be having it rough. Yesterday, words were your little darlin’s, today they’re little devils. What to do? What to do? When you’re having a tough time corralling your thoughts and lassoing your runaway verbs and nouns, often the best ploy isn’t panic, it’s play.

When I feel the yen to amuse my muse with a little lighthearted entertainment, here are a few tricks I’ve found that work well for me:

Using different type fonts: My miraculous Mac has loads of fonts to choose from. As a way of playing around when writing, I sometimes use different typefaces. It’s fun to see what happens when the subject and the typeface I’m using seem at odds with each other — like two mismatched socks. 

Using different colored inks: I love color! The more the merrier! A drawer in my office is often loaded with turquoise ink cartridges. Just seeing bright, teal-blue ink flowing from my favorite fountain pen makes me smile. It’s easy to play around on the page when the words on them sparkle and pop.

Using colored index cards or paper: Jotting notes about a project on different colored need cards is a fun way to jog your imagination. I have lots of these around me with inspiring quotes and ideas.

I could go on and tell you about all the toys I have in my tiny office: my Slinky, my top, my bubbles, but I’ll stop here. Hopefully, I’ve made you smile. Any more playful ideas to toss in the sandbox? I’d love to hear them! Now, let’s all have fun and write on!

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Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic. He’s described the “most popular poet” in the United States. His work has been translated in many languages around the world. I came across an inspiring gathering of his quotes about living and writing dangerously, and wanted to share them:

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”

“Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.”

“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”

“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”

“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”

“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth.”

“What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.”

“Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.”

“There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.
You feel it, don’t you?”

May some of these words light a fire in your heart as we all write on!

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Here’s something I learned as a successful freelancer that I’ve found very helpful in my creative writing: the importance of taking time to decompress throughout the day.

Some projects were quick turnarounds and some were longer, but they always had deadlines. I always met them and this earned me a reputation as a reliable, go-to pro. 

I learned that the best way to keep myself from burning out was to give myself time to decompress — to wind down and take it easy in between intense bouts of work. This allowed me to recharge so that I could bring my full cup of mental energy to the next stage of my work.

I’ve taken the same approach with my creative writing. It works well for me — and I think it can help you manage your energy more effectively as well. Giving yourself time to decompress after an especially intense round of writing can:

Prevent burnout: Sapping your creative energies is never a good idea. When you feel burned out, you lose your momentum, Even more serious, you run the risk of losing your motivation. You lose not just your drive when you feel drained, you also lose the joy and playfulness that are so important to spirited writing.

Re-boot your creativity: When you allow yourself to recover from intense mental activity, you give yourself the chance to renew your creative juices. You also give yourself the opportunity to let wonderful new ideas bubble up and to open new paths to unexpected discoveries.

Renew your commitment: We all need to step out of our comfort zones to stretch and grow. We all have far deeper mental and physical reserves than we give ourselves credit for. Even so, if we push ourselves to the point of strain, it’s harder to bounce back. When this happens, our commitment to our writing goals can flag.

Decompressing can be as simple as building small breaks into your day: punctuating intense bouts of work, with quick restorative walks or stretching, for example. Or it can mean giving yourself a day to relax, digest, and integrate major changes you’ve made to a draft so that you can revisit them with a fresh eye and mind. Sometimes just reading a magazine or taking time for a movie works. 

How about you? Are there any ways you decompress that work well for you? If so, I’d love to have you share them as we all write on!

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I love Halloween! I can’t wait to see all the kids on my street in their cute costumes. I’ve seen fairies, princesses, and even an adorable walking dictionary! And speaking of Halloween, here’s a heart-warming story about the power of words:

One night in the late 1940s after an action-packed Halloween, Mary Emma Allison, a young teacher and mother of three, turned to her husband and said, “It’s too bad we can’t turn this into something good.” Mary and her husband Clyde, a minister, were already collecting clothes for children in post-war Europe. Sparked by Mary’s words, they came up with the notion that American children could somehow combine their Halloween fun with helping needy kids abroad.

Then one day, Mary and her three children happened to see a parade of kids dressed in native costumes wending its way through the streets of Philadelphia. They followed the colorful procession into a department store and then began following a cow which led them to a booth belonging to Unicef. The parade, the cow, and the booth were all part of a program to send powdered milk to needy children overseas.

Inspired by the parade to put kids, trick-or-treating, and Unicef together, Mary sat down and wrote an appeal that was published in 1950 just before Halloween in a national magazine edited by her husband. In her article, she asked trick-or-treaters to combine their hunt for candy with a drive to collect coins for Unicef in tins or milk cartons.

The simple idea, first shared with her husband and then shared in a brief story read by parents across America, caught fire. While there’s no record of how much that first appeal raised, over the years, Trick-or-Treat for Unicef has raised nearly $160 million. Those dollars have purchased food, clean water, milk, medicine, and other precious items for children in more than 150 countries.

One mother’s idea, one conversation, one magazine story, and five words, “Trick-or-treat for Unicef” have saved millions of young lives — amazing. That’s the power of story—let’s harness it as we all write on!

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