writing process

Getting Out of the Way

“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.

What is the Weirdest Thing?

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.

The Writer’s Notebook: Don’t Leave Home Without It!

“Inside Sedaris’s left shirt pocket, he keeps an omnipresent notebook, a little spiral-bound one, in which he writes down everything that happens that might later be of use. If he walks out of the house and realizes he’s forgotten it, he turns around and goes home. “I might see a worm attacking a centipede. I might see a bumper sticker,” he says. “I don’t know how to turn off that part of myself that exploits everyone and everything that I come into contact with.”

I love this juicy bit from Monica Hesse’s article about writer David Sedaris in The Washington Post (October 4, 2010). When I’m doing school visits, I tell kids that if they see me on the street, they should stop me and ask me if I have my writer’s notebook-that’s because I always have it with me. Wouldn’t go to the grocery store without it, which is why I like pocket-sized notebooks. Writers are essentially spies.

Filed under: writer's notebook • writing process • writing tips

The Need for Obstacles

One of the recurring problems I see when I’m critiquing a story is the lack of an obstacle or nemesis. William Gibson calls it “the barrier” in his excellent book about writing titled Shakespeare’s Game. Something must get in the way of the main character’s yearning or else there is no tension and ultimately no climax. Writes Gibson: “…if Hamlet at once marches off to stab the King, what have we lost? –the play.”

It seems obvious and yet many writers create stories without an obstacle or nemesis. I do it myself. I get caught up with the main character and allow him or her free reign when I should be causing problem after problem for the poor thing. Only after a hundred pages or so, when I’m wondering why the story isn’t working, does it hit me. I’m being too nice.

We spend our lives trying to avoid creating obstacles for other people, so why should it come easy when we write? It’s scary to close the door on our main character’s desire; but if we do, if we dream up a fantastic barrier, then our hero will have to work hard to get what he or she wants, and therein will be the story.

Filed under: nemesis • obstacles • writing process • writing tips

Learning from a Master

Let’s say you’re reading a book, and you come across a sentence that blows you away because of its poetry or cadence or economy or expansiveness. Mark it. Then at some point, come back and don’t just read it again. Write that sentence down in your writer’s notebook, word for word, comma for comma. In doing so, you will get the feeling of that sentence in your muscle memory–the clauses, the pauses, the rhythm. When it’s time for you to write, what you learned will come out to play.

Here’s one that I wrote down recently from Elizabeth Strout’s excellent book, Olive Kitteridge:

Olive, years ago, had taught math at the Crosby Junior High School, and while her emotions at times had attached themselves fiercely to particular students, Andrea Bibber had never seemed to her to be anything more than a small, dull, asseverating mouse.

Perhaps this exercise is akin to the idea of the artist who learns by copying a much-admired painting, brush stroke for brush stroke.

Filed under: writer's notebook • writing process • writing tips

What did I learn?

If you want to learn something, one of the best ways to do it is to be conscious of what you are learning. That may sound ridiculously obvious, but life has a way of flooding the mind with too much information and sweeping the newly-learned or almost-learned stuff out to sea.

The best way for me to be conscious of what I’m learning is to literally write what I’m learning down. After every class that I teach (or take) I force myself to sit and write down at least one thing that I learned. Sometimes it’s easy; sometimes not. Usually, the act of writing helps realizations to occur.

I put myself through a course in humor writing by watching funny movies with an agenda: each time I watched, I had to write down at least one thing I learned about why it was funny.

If you’re taking a class, create a ritual for yourself (a mini notebook? a set of 3×5 cards? a dedicated blog?) to write down what you are learning.

Filed under: Mary Amato • writer's notebook • writing for children • writing process • writing tips

How to Read a Novel

One of the students in my Fiction for Young Readers class asked what she should focus on when she’s reading the novels I assigned.

First of all, I read for enjoyment, of course; but I do analyze books as I read, and I do it on two basic levels. Think of a house. You’ve got the individual planks of wood (those are sentences); and then you have the entire structure (the story). When I’m reading on the sentence level, I’m looking at the quality of the writing: fresh metaphors, rhythm, sentence construction. When I’m reading on the structure level, I’m thinking about whether or not the story works and how it was constructed.

On the story level, I analyze by asking myself questions: What is the heart of the story? If you boil it down to its most basic form, what is the story about? Try to define this in just one or two sentences. Usually, the heart of the story comes from looking at what your main character is yearning for and what gets in the way of him/her. This is basic Aristotle.

Then I look closely at the climax. Stories that work have climaxes that spring forth in an organic and inevitable way from the story’s heart. Identifying and analyzing how a writer moves from heart to climax is a simple and excellent way to get STORY into your bloodstream.

Some great books that emphasize the importance of understanding basic story structure:
William Gibson’s Shakespeare’s Game (yes, plays work the same way)