the writer's block |
The blog
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the writer's block |
The blog
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Writing can get pretty lonely. It’s just you, your imaginary friends, and a computer for hours on end. And no matter how often we talk about our WIPs over coffee or yell about them on Twitter, until we have something to show for all our blood, sweat, and tears the odds of us showing them to anyone are slim. So once we do finish a WIP it’s no surprise that we immediately want to show it to people and hear what they think. We want to know what they liked, where they were confused, and ultimately how we can improve this thing we’ve invested so much of our time and energy into.
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:
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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