the writer's block |
The blog
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the writer's block |
The blog
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In an ideal world we’d have a brain blast, pop a squat in front of our computers, and have the "right" words pouring out of us faster than peanut butter melting on hot toast. But let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? Writing a first draft is nothing short of a grind. And for most of us mere mortals life is rarely conducive to getting that first draft down. Between our job(s), kids, pets, skeleton clowns, bills, Netflix, #NotMyAriel trending on Twitter (-_-), global warming, Amazon, and the 99 other problems and obstacles weighing down on us there’s always some kind of noise working to derail our momentum. But there’s power in this noise. If you give yourself the space and time to wade through it.
Over the past six weeks, Game of Thrones fans have endured some of the most stressful 80-minute episodes of television ever created. Visually, the season was stunning, the acting was stellar, and once again Ramin Djawadi proved he’s an international treasure we don’t deserve. But despite the visual effects, performances, epic score, and heart-pounding action, the overall consensus—based on the slew of articles, petitions, memes, and tweets—is disappointment. These last six episodes should’ve been the show’s finest hours, and yet they seem to have fallen short. Why? If writers take nothing else away from this final season, they should realize that audiences don’t want shock and awe they want human stories.
Read the rest of the article on LitReactor. Yes! We are less than one week away from Barrelhouse magazine’s Conversations and Connections! While I’m not able to attend this spring, I’m planning to attend in the fall (fingers crossed). For those of you who find AWP intimidating, overwhelming, and/or too damn expensive, I would highly recommend checking out Conversations and Connections. It's a bi-annual, one-day writing conference that brings writers, editors, and publishers together. Barrelhouse has been hosting it in Arlington, VA during the spring for over ten years, and has been hosting it in Pittsburgh, PA during the fall for the past five years. There has always been a lot of emphasis placed on the first line. Many consider it the hook: the sentence that will entice—or deter—the reader from pressing on. To an extent this is true. First lines are important. However, I would argue the emphasis put on them is misplaced. Writers should worry less about crafting the perfect first line and more concerned about crafting an opening that builds momentum.
During my second year at Mason’s MFA program, I took a workshop with Tania James who had recently done a Q+A with Hannah Tinti about what she looks for when she is accepting submissions for One Story. Tania shared the details of the Q+A with us and this in turn led to a larger discussion about narrative. While Tinti likes the basic narrative structure, she has put her own fresh spin on it. The narrative "structure" Tinti uses to asses the stories she reads and the ones that she writes looks something like this:
In the bowls of what used to be Robinson A at George Mason—for as I type this the building is either a) in the process of being demolished or b) has been demolished - in a cubicle of a classroom - that should have been somebody's office - I, along with twenty-one other aspiring fiction writers, watched our professor draw the following diagram onto the whiteboard:
One common pitfall writers continue to get stuck in is exposition quicksand. What is exposition quicksand? Well it can be a number of things. Sometimes it is when a writer tells the reader what happened in summary, glazing over the highlights and then moving onto another ‘part’ of the story, which is also just a summarization of events. Other times its descriptions saturated with adjectives and images that are down right beautiful but honestly, unnecessary. And then there are moments where the writer info dumps about the world and how it works.[1]Whatever the case may be, before we know it we are neck deep in information that our readers probably don’t need in order to understand what is happening in the story.
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