"Extraordinary Eruptions of Information"
Musings on Literature, Art, Writing, and Life in the Age of Quantification
So you’ve spend a lot of time writing and revising a story. You’re getting to a point where it’s in pretty good shape. Maybe you’ve had some beta readers look through all or part of it. Maybe you’ve workshopped it.
Before you release it upon the world (or upon literary agents), consider pausing for a sensitivity reading.
Continue reading “Sensitivity readings: An essential part of writing”One of the things that’s been joyously freeing about my writing program is that we’re given permission to do something important: Write badly.
In order to create a sculpture, you have to start with a big block of clay, or a stone, or a chunk of wood. At first, you’re just hacking pieces away and getting it into the general shape. Over time, you add more details and then begin to polish it up.
In the beginning… Make a colossal, unapologetic mess. Write disconnected chunks of text and snippets of conversation. Let characters emerge without worrying too much about how they fit. Write cringe-inducing dialogue and scenes dripping with cliches. Just let the story emerge.
Once it’s emerged… Put it into some sort of order, know your characters and why they exist, but let the mistakes and gaps and bad dialogue and cliches stand. Just make a thing that has a beginning, middle, and end.
Then! Then you start cleaning it up. Then you start polishing. Then you pull out the sharper tools in your box and make your rough thing into something more artful.
For me, a first draft is an emergence. I have a pretty good grasp on my story, but it’s still revealing things to me. It’s still whispering its small confessions, and I’m still exploring all the different pieces of it.
Free yourself from expectations and pressures. Give yourself permission to be messy, and most importantly – write badly. Write badly as hard and painfully and truthfully as you can.
The mess comes first. The art comes later.
Killing time before my writing class, perhaps waiting for something in the way one waits for Godot. A blue-haired girl with large, round rimmed glasses is to my left, Misfits sticker prominently placed on her laptop, studying for what I think is a chemistry exam with a raven-haired girl with thick-rimmed black glasses. To my right, a young man in torn pants typing away on his laptop, which is in his lap instead of on the table. Is he hiding something?
Old men sit and talk of people they know, or have known; their tenses shift as often as they do, clearly uncomfortable on the hard wooden chairs. On the patio, a group of colleagues has some beer after work, badges still hanging around their necks. Flies buzz around, tempted, I suppose, by the general stickiness of the place.
Beast of Burden plays loudly, drowning out the white noise of the traffic outside.
Sunny mornings, thundery afternoons. That’s been the weather pattern lately, meaning the days start bright, but become gray by afternoon, making it seem later than it really is.
This weather has me thinking about things like light and dark.
Recently someone said to me, “I can see you writing some dark stuff.” They didn’t mean it in a negative way, just a sense they got, and they were spot on.
For those of us who write things that are a bit darker, there are reasons why we prefer the thunder to the sun.
Continue reading “Writer of the moonlight”