Karinwritesdangerously

God Says Yes To Me

Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said sure it is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

This delightful poem is a gift to us from fellow author, editor and poetry lover, Toby Stein.

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Sometimes. we just want to cut loose and work on something different. Shifting genre gears can be a great way to do this. But getting up to speed in a field with different conventions can be tricky.

This calls to mind a chat I once had with a fellow writer. He and a friend planned to work on a screenplay together. Since they loved thrillers that was the genre they were exploring.

Right away the Hitchcock classic North by Northwest popped into my head. Cary Grant plays an everyman character embroiled in a nefarious plot. Along the way, he falls in love with Eva Marie Saint. The story builds to an action-packed ending on Mount Rushmore.

Anyway, I suggested the two budding screenwriters take a look at North by Northwest (rated among the top 100 films by the American Film Institute), and a few other classic films and really spend time analyzing just how they work. This was one of the great tips my wonderful playwrighting coach once suggested.

Actually, he advised us to take one play we really loved and live with it for a time, reading and rereading it, getting to know it inside and out — so that we would really understand what made it tick.

What a great piece of advice!

It’s the “hedgehog” strategy — as in “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Diving deep into a classic in a genre and spending time with it can be a very efficient, productive way to probe the underlying principles that drive it. It can also give you fresh appreciation for how an elegant and engaging story is constructed. 

There are so many fruitful questions you can ask as you analyze a novel or play or film script you admire: How and when does it draw you in? What qualities does the main character reveal in the opening of the story? How does the writer release plot clues in a way that keeps you engaged and sustains momentum? Why is the ending satisfying — and is it surprising or does it seem inevitable?

Taking a deep dive into a work you love can be so much fun! Write on!

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“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Albert Einstein

We’ve all had those moments when we feel like our muse is on vacation and our creative juices just aren’t flowing. What to do, what to do? As my friend and mentor Rob Gilbert often says on his Success Hotline (973.743.4690), “you’re not lacking creativity, you’re blocking it. » A few creativity-boosting strategies to help jump-start your writing:

Make unlikely connections: A hallmark of creativity is the ability to make surprising links between ideas and things. Consider wonderful similes or metaphors that helped you see with a fresh eye and mind. Or the different ways kids use a cardboard box — as a spaceship, a lemonade stand, a log cabin, a clubhouse. One simple way to challenge yourself to creatively connect the dots is to pick three words randomly from a newspaper or a dictionary and spend 15 minutes writing a story about them. You’ll be amazed at what you come up with. 

Come up with a new angle: If you’re writing a novel, for example, you might rewrite a scene from your antagonist’s point of view instead of your hero or heroines. Or you might play devil’s advocate and try to talk one of you characters out of taking an action and see how he or she responds. You might also find inspiration by having an inanimate object or a creature without a voice share its view of what’s unfolding.

Switch gears: Sometimes all we need to get our creative juices flowing is a mental coffee break — a pause that refreshes. Since we work with words all day, grabbing some crayons or colored pencils and drawing free hand or in one of those new adult coloring books can be relaxing and reenergizing. If you’re a logical left-brainer, try daydreaming and see where it takes you; if you’re a right-brain intuitive, solving a complex puzzle can help your creative juices start flowing.

Creativity is a bottomless well, just waiting to be tapped: The more we draw from it, the more there is to draw from. Are there any creativity boosting techniques you’ve found especially helpful during a dry patch? Feel free to share them as we all write on.

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“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
H.L. Mencken

“My task, which I am trying to achieve, is, by the power of the
written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is before all,
to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”
Joseph Conrad

Enticing readers to enter the world you create through your words can be challenging. One of the best tools you have at your command is color — the vividness or variety of your language. Anecdotes, similes, and metaphors — these can all add richness and texture to your writing.

As Jack Hart notes in A Writer’s Coach, readers want to be rewarded for the time and effort they devote to an author’s work. One way to reward them, says Hart, is to seed your story with “nuggets that give pleasure. Think of them as the chips in a chocolate-chip cookie.”

Color offers a reader the joy of discovery; an unexpected comparison, an unusual modifier, or a detail that reveals much more than meets the eye — these are all pleasure-giving nuggets that can engage and entrance readers and keep them moving along with you through your story. 

Raymond Chandler, who created the classic detective Philip Marlowe used to write on half sheets of paper; his self-imposed goal was to create “a little bit of magic” on each half sheet. That’s a form of color.

Jack Hart devotes a whole chapter to adding color to writing. Here are a few tips you may find helpful:

• Pick three details: Capture your characters by describing three details that define who they are in revealing and insightful ways. 

• Sharpen your similes: Coming up with arresting, unusual comparisons adds flavor and spice to your writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald honed their descriptive skills by picking out random objects and then creating comparisons for them. 

• Use color carefully: “Metaphors, similes, and other figurative devices work best when you measure them out carefully,” observes Hart. Using too many can dilute their impact; too few can make your writing seem lackluster. So sprinkle them artfully throughout your prose to add spice and snap. And write on!

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Customize buttons

« Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost. »
Henry James, from his essay The Art of Fiction.

Habit blinds us all: We fall into familiar byways without even noticing that it happens and begin to look at the world with a kind of sameness that can make both our days and our writing seem lackluster. 

How can we bring childlike wonder back into our days and words?

How can we refresh our writing so it sings and dances?

In Becoming a Writer, a classic work on the creative process, Dorothea Brande tackles this problem head on in a chapter called “Learning to See again.” In it, she suggests that one of the keys to fresher writing is to be in the moment when we are out in the world — to turn our “attention outward,” instead of constantly immersing ourselves in our problems or obsessive planning to the point where we miss what’s unfolding around us — the life happening right in front of us. 

How do we become someone “on whom nothing is lost”? Here’s what Dorothea suggests: “By way of getting to that desirable state, set yourself a short period each day when you will, by taking thought, recapture a childlike ‘innocence of eye.’” Here’s how:

For half an hour every day, transport yourself back to the “state of wide-eyed interest that was yours when you were five.”

Even though you may feel strange at first doing something so deliberately that was once as easy and natural as breathing, if you stay with it, you’ll find that you can slip into that state of total curiosity where everything is being seen as if for the first time, fresh and sparkling. When you do, you’ll find that “you are able to gather stores of new material” that you can mine in your writing.

Don’t rush to use whatever these half-hour “fresh seeing” mental excursions bring you. If you do, you’re likely to find that they turn flat and factual — like a journalist’s notes. Instead, give them time to work themselves into your writing. As Dorothea says, “wait for the unconscious mind to work its miracles of assimilation and accretion on them.”

I love this notion of “fresh seeing” — of recapturing that sense of childlike wonder that made the world so exciting when we were kids. If we can bring some of that newness and fresh-born excitement to our writing, our words will begin to sing and dance. I’m going to give this a go. How about you? Write on!

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“Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the
study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer,
however happy, however tragic, is ever wasted.”

P. D. James

P. D. James is known as the “Queen of Crime,” yet she’s widely admired for blurring the line between the crime novel and literary fiction. She launched her career as a novelist by writing from 6 AM to 8 AM before going to her civil service job. She was forty-two when her first novel was published. An online site gathered together some pungent and inspiring PD James quotes on writing that I wanted to share with you:

“Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely.
Increase your word power. Find your own individual
voice through practicing constantly. Go through the
world with your eyes and ears open and learn to
express that experience in words.”

“It shows considerable wisdom to know what you
want in life and then to direct all your energies
towards getting it.”

“Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some
evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational,
comprehensible, and moral universe.”

“Increase your word power. Words are the raw
material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary,
the more effective your writing. We who write in
English are fortunate to have the richest and most
versatile language in the world. Respect it.”

“Write what you need to write, not what is currently
popular or what you think will sell.”

“Read widely and discriminately. Bad writing is
contagious.”

“It is undoubtedly a lonely career, but I suspect
the people who find it terribly lonely are not
writers. I think if you are a writer you realise
how valuable the time is when you are
absolutely alone with your characters in
complete peace.”

Wise words from a woman who surely wrote dangerously. Inspired and energized, let’s write on!

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Bing Chang, a cherished KWD reader, shared this lovely reflection on on character in a comment and I wanted to share it with you:

« We often speak of “character” or “human nature” as though they were well-defined concepts. Yet perhaps what we observe is only the visible expression of a much deeper reality. If humanity bears the image of God, then the ultimate depth of human nature is as inexhaustible as the One whose image we bear. We recognize courage, compassion, creativity, love, and sacrifice as expressions of that nature, but they are only glimpses of something we cannot fully define. We know the leaves of the tree, but not the full mystery of its roots. Character is not the essence of humanity; it is the visible shoreline of an ocean whose depths ultimately reach into the mystery of God. »

—Bing Chang

Inspiring writerly quotes for us to savor and apply. Enjoy!

“In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos,
make one definitive act. Just write.”
Natalie Goldberg

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
William Wordsworth

“Practice from things as they are, and you will find strength and ease and a new fancy and new spirit coming altogether.”
John Ruskin to the artist Kate Greenaway.

“One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time, in others’ minds.”
Alfred Kazin

“But have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.”
May Sarton

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
Douglas Adams

“I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something. You don’t always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.”
Grace Paley

“If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both — you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
Ray Bradbury

“And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
Erica Jong

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”
D. H. Lawrence

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
George Eliot

I hope one of these writers whispers to you just the inspiration you need today as you write on!

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Today, July 30, is the divine Emily Bronte’s birthday. What a gift she is to the world — her fire, her compassion, her poetry, and the sublime and stormy Wuthering Heights! Gems from Emily to enliven us all:

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

“I have everything dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”

“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: it vexes me to choose another guide.”

Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?”

“I see heaven’s glories shine and faith shines equal.”

“The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them.”

“I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”

“If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.”

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.”

“Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.”

“She burned too bright for this world.”

And now, inspired and energized, let’s all write on!

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None of us want to do: make a “rookie mistake.” That’s how a top athlete recently described a meltdown he had: He forgot to load up on carbs prior to a tough day and ran out of gas. This isn’t the kind of mishap a seasoned pro should experience.

The same goes for us as writers: making rookie mistakes pegs us as amateurs, when we want to be viewed as pros. At one point, I came across an interview with agents that pinpointed common problems they saw in the work of beginning writers.”

Lack of narrative momentum: You can have great characters, great dialogue,and great ideas, but if your plot wanders aimlessly, it’s not going to find an audience. As one agent said, ‘ Your story has to be propulsive; it has to have narrative energy and carry readers forward.

Fuzzy openings: Getting the opening right really matters. Some books don’t really start until page five or even page fifty. Agents and editors aren’t going to be all that patient about a murky beginning because they know that many readers won’t stay on board. Worth remembering here: Some readers and agents are fans of action openings and others love a slow, world-building start. But whatever approach you choose to tell you story, craft it with care and polish it until it shines.

Focusing on publishing, instead of polishing: Most of the agents on the panel agreed that many writers don’t put enough time into polishing their books before they jump into the submission process. Revise your book, then put it away, then revise it yet again — that’s what one seasoned agent counseled. 

Be professional: Once you land an agent and an editor, always remember that they are extremely busy and that their time is valuable. Don’t waste it by bombarding them with emails. Another tip: watch what you blog about. Anything you put out on the Internet has a long life and enormous exposure. Agents and editors who are thinking of representing you will check out your online presence.

Valuable advice from seasoned pros: Let’s use it to sharpen our stories — and write on! 

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