“For me, anyway, [writing] is what infuses the world with meaning,” says Jennifer Egan in the Washington Post’s BookWorld (9-18-11).
Not true for me. As I see it, the world is infused with meaning, whether or not I happen to notice. Writing, for me, is proof that I am noticing; it is also a way of making the perception of meaning concrete so that it can be shared.
Thomas Kaufman, author of the new detective novel, Steal the Show, gave this tip at a recent booksigning: Turn off your monitor when you’re writing your novel. When you’re not looking at your words as they appear on your screen, you’ll be more likely to get into the flow and stay in character.
Have you ever tried this?
Jim Benton, author of the popular Dear Dumb Diary series, says that the diary format frees him up. When he gets into character, in this case the “writer” is a middle school girl named Jamie Kelly, he lets it all pour out. “Jamie can write about anything because she thinks nobody will read it.”
If you’re stuck, try pretending that you are another character writing in a diary. Let it all out!
People ask where ideas for books (or scenes within books) come from. I think one of the most important things to do is very simple: Pay attention when you laugh. If you are sharing an anecdote or a family story with a friend, and you’re laughing about it, that means there’s some gold to mine in that story.
For example, when talking with other parents about the trials of parenting teens, I would often retell the story of my brother-in-law literally taking the bedroom door of my teenage nephew off the hinges to force more transparency into the household. We’d laugh over it. Then when it came time for the father in my The Naked Mole-Rat Letters to do something radical to show his daughter than he wanted her to stop lying and hiding, he went for the power screwdriver. The scene had humor, truth, and heart…all because of that detail.
At a recent SoMIRAC (conference), author and illustrator Susan Stockdale told the audience how she grew up with a love for language in part because her mother used rhyme so playfully around the house. Here’s one rhyme she heard many-a-time during her childhood at the dining room table:
Shake and shake the ketchup bottle, none’ll come and then a lot’ll.
The more wordplay you share with kids–whether you’re a teacher or a parent–the more likely they are to grow up having fun with language.
Writer Pamela Ehrenberg says it’s all about the shoes. Ordinary shoes. In college, she went to hear author Bobbie Ann Mason speak and recalls staring at her shoes. They were humble, inexpensive shoes, and Ehrenberg recalls being struck by the realization that this author had to stand in line and buy shoes, just like the rest of us. I didn’t see an author in person until I was in college. I attended a reading by poet Gwendolyn Brooks and was so moved that I wrote her a letter. When I received the reply back, written in pen on an ordinary sheet of paper, I remember the thrill. The hand-writing of the grand dame of poetry looked just like mine.
This is why it’s so wonderful for schools and libraries to bring authors in to speak with children!
“I don’t know [expletive] about words. The reason the language comes out that way is, it’s me just trying to get out of the way.” This provocative quote from Irish playwright Enda Kenny (from a recent Washington Post article by Peter Marks) speaks to an important concept that I am continually stressing to students. Writing is about ideas; words serve the story. Too much writing instruction and critique-group feedback focus on the superficial level of the sentences. A fiction writer who is too conscious about constructing beautiful or clever sentences puts his/her mind into the inkwell of pen, instead of into the heart/mind/soul of the character, which is where it needs to reside in order to write a story.
When Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and editor-in-chief of One Story Magazine, gets bored writing, she doesn’t ask, “What happens next?” She asks herself this question: “What’s the weirdest thing that can happen right now?” At this year’s AWP conference, Tinti said that you don’t want weirdness for the sake of weirdness, but pushing yourself to think outside your own box can help move your story forward.
