The Scrawl

I’m not a computer freelancer, but I’ve found FreelanceSwitch.com has plenty to offer anyone looking to be more organized,  more original, and more creative.  I attempted the activity presented there by Robert Janelle earlier this week – solve a problem by writing a list of one-hundred solutions.  Joe latched onto the idea from .  In true interweb fashion, Janelle professes to have snagged the idea from Litemind writer, Luciano Passuello.  By subscribing to Freelance Switch, I not only get a great idea to try but a link to a blog I’ve never heard of but which appears to be right up my alley (it’s about creating higher efficiency, which I need in spades).

I followed the guidelines from Janelle and Passuello and wrote out one-hundred possible blog topics for The Scrawl.  Some I really dig (where and when I like to write, magazines and journals I read and why), some feel like I’m reaching a little (which pens and pencils I prefer to write with), and some are dependent on a specific timeline (writing about my thesis reading, comprehensive exam).  Expect to read some posts generated from this list.

I plan on trying this one-hundred listing activity again for creative projects and work projects, and maybe even try it again for The Scrawl if the well begins to run dry.  If there’s a topic you’d like me to write about in this blog then comment away, dear reader.

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I recently reorganized my home office desk and hung a spare 2′ x 3′ bulletin board on the wall directly over the desk.  This wall used to feature posters advertising sketch comedy shows I’ve written and directed and while it’s inspirational to remember good friends, good times, and good writing from the past, I want to create a wall which lends itself to inspiring my present and future.

I planted my daily schedule for fall and spring semesters side-by-side, smackdab in the middle of the bulletin board.  The top 4″ x 3′ is lined with production art postcards up from The Incredibles, one of my favorite films.  In one corner, a favorite Far Side cartoon, near the bottom a “Life is Art” postcard from Fox Tax, a four-panel strip of photobooth snapshots of the fiancée and me, my season tickets to aforementioned fiancée’s roller derby bouts, and a wonderful postcard I picked up at AWP last year from the Poets.org table featuring Walt Whitman’s face depicted in a mosaic of letters spelling out “APRIL 2007 NATIONAL POETRY MONTH” over and over.

Surrounding the bulletin board, I have larger pieces of what (and who) I hope will inspire me:  a preview handout (again from AWP) for Walter Mosley’s latest nonfiction work, This Year You Write Your Novel, two inspirational quote postcards (“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson and “You are pure potential.” – improv guru Martin de Maat), a printed list of Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, and five 8.5″ x 11″ black-and-white printouts of five favorite writers:  Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, and Walt Whitman.  Here’s hoping what they say about the company you keep being true…

The bulletin board and surrounding wall space aren’t stuffed full of content, and I plan to keep it this way.  Despite it having bits and bobs from all over, there’s a streamlined quality to the ensemble of papers and bright inks.  I’m already finding myself typing away and looking up every once in a while to reset my eyes (and brain) and soaking in the wall I’ve created.  Here’s to the present and the future.

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[tags]bulletin board organization, writing inspiration, roller derby[/tags]

Last night, my screenwriting class workshopped my latest seventeen pages, a sort of Act II, Part One. I received plenty of notes, but not nearly as many positive notes as I wanted or thought would come my way. In fact, I admit my pages weren’t particularly well-received.

Which is a nice way of saying I bombed.

Much of what made the first act work for my classmates was how action and dialogue worked in-tandem. Picture Action, cool and confident, in the driver’s seat of the Scriptmobile. Next to him is his partner, Dialogue, smart and able, assisting Action with navigation directions. The pair work in perfect unison as a team, as partners. In these new pages, however, Dialogue has throatpunched Action and thrown him in the backseat. Dialogue has slid into the driver’s seat of the Scriptmobile and hit the gas, spewing as much vocabulary across the road of paper as it can, all the while laughing at the incapacitated Action. The new pages are dialogue-heavy, action-light, and have lost what made the first pages my class workshopped so enjoyable to read.

This leaves me with two choices:

1. Despise my classmates, loathe the workshop, and keep my golden pages because I put a lot of work into them and if I put in a solid amount of work they must be good, so what do they  know?!

2. Embrace the challenge of rewrite, give these peer thoughts proper attention, make a plan of action and fix what needs fixing, all the while pursuing new work.

If I’m not taking the second choice, I have no business being in a writing workshop, giving anyone notes on their writing, or writing at all. I’m learning to write for an audience. I’m learning to create good story. I’m learning to improve. Part of the learning process is understanding when something needs more work, and I’m on board with that concept. For me, these pages didn’t fail if they taught me a lesson (my class is 100% right, by the way), and I’m embracing the challenge I’ve created for myself.

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Write a first-person point-of-view story about a character waiting for something to happen. Interweave the action of waiting with the character’s thoughts and reflections. See if the action and reflection intersect. Give this exercise fifteen minutes of your attention.

Write it up and see what happens.

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As I finished up listening to Stephen King’s On Writing, I listened to him speak about a hypothetical beginning writer and their tale of trying to get noticed in the industry.  As King read his sample query letter, the title of a fake story reminded me very much of a short story I started writing back in 2005, but haven’t touched in nearly two years.  It also reminded me very much that every time I’ve listened to King read his book, which is at least twice a year as a sort of pre-semester pep talk, I remember the short story and how I’ve left it behind.

I’ve resolved to pull it out of the draw, dust it off, and give this piece of unfinished, forgotten writing a little attention.  I likely wouldn’t have thought of this story without King’s verbal prompt, but it makes me want to look through my hard drive for old, lost projects and writing bits that aren’t quite ready for the graveyard.  In fact, that’s how I came across a story idea I’ve been writing off and on this month.  That’s two signs in a row to revive past ideas, and I doubt I’ll be ignoring them.  What will you find in your old hard drives or notebooks?  Perhaps it’s time to find out…

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[tags]unfinished writing, query letter[/tags]

Write a scene in which two characters bump into each other for the first time in ten years. What do they talk about? What don’t they talk about? What’s the emotional center of their relationship? How will point-of-view effect this story? Give this exercise fifteen minutes of your attention.

Write it up and see what happens.

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I rearranged my desk today.  I don’t have an actual desk; it’s a five-foot long fold-out table, the kind with heavy metal legs and a wooden tabletop topped off with a the vinyl sticker coating the surface to make it resemble a deep oak finish.  Because it’s a table and not a desk, I’m able to rearrange what goes on top without worrying about a specialized layout.  Today I swapped my computer tower from one side of the table to the other and everything else – the monitor, the 3-in-1 printer, the pen caddy, the paper – it all slid down one spot to the right as a result.  I’m hopeful this opens more workspace for drawing, long-hand writing, and the laptop, as well as gets the tower out of the way of what I’ve had to christen “the spill zone,” where I typically park my giant glass of ice water.

This is the third time I’ve rearranged this table set up in two years.  At first, the table was underneath stretched out lengthwise under my home office window.  Later, I moved it into its current position, up against the wall with the window to the left, making an L-shape.  And now, the rearrangement of what’s on top of the table.  I can’t say I have definitive proof any of these table set ups helped or hindered my quest for creativity, but I do know I felt fresh and wanting to accomplish something grand each time I set up my workstation.

A good workspace helps me stay creative.   It’s neat and organized, it’s spacious, and it’s all mine.  This may not be where the ideas are born, but it certainly is where they get typed up.  I’m not a believer in fung shue but I do believe in accessibility, appeal, and comfort.  Letting those ideals permeate the place where I exercise my creativity seems like a no-brainer and here I sit, feeling fresh and wanting to accomplish something grand.  Nothing wrong with that, dear reader.

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[tags]rearrange your desk, workspace, table instead of desk[/tags]

Say what you will about Literature with a capital “L” or Canon with a captial “C” and where exactly Stephen King fits in there, if you even believe he fits in there at all.  To me, the man can write and knows a little something about the craft and has plenty of passion for it.  I’m a fan of King’s short stories over his longer work (if you’re new to King and not sure where to start, try his short story collection “Everything’s Eventual,” – the hardcover is oft to be found in Barnes & Noble bargain shelves everywhere), but no matter what he’s written I tend to enjoy it most in the audio version.

King is a rare jewel of a writer who reads his own work for the audio version and presents it unabridged.  This does two things – it lets the reader feel how the author intended their story to be taken in and it doesn’t bow to corporate pressures of fitting everything onto a certain number of CDs, all nice and neat.  If you’re like me and you love audiobooks but not the price, try your local library for a wide selection.  I guarantee you’ll find some King there.

I’m (re-)listening to King’s On Writing between commutes to school and work and love the way it inspires me to write.  King’s book is one part autobiography, one part how-to for craft, and one part how-to for breaking into the business.  He approaches the craft in a practical way and explains it with the accessible ease of a good friend relating an old favorite yarn.  I tend to listen to On Writing in August and January, just as new semesters begin, as well as the top of the summer to encourage myself not to let those sunny months go to waste when it comes to getting creative.  I don’t find myself in a writing slump right now, but King’s book is a welcomed pep talk, and his practical advice is worth my time right now.

I’ll try to write about some of my favorite bits in the book here, in terms of how they inspire me and how I use them in my own writing, soon.  I have, by the way, found the audio version on cassette and the hardcover of On Writing both relatively easy and for under $10 apiece.  And, as if I couldn’t plug them enough in this blog, I believe there are a few copies at bookcloseouts.com.

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[tags]Stephen King, On Writing, audiobooks, writing inspiration[/tags]

I’m teaching a section of “Introduction to Creative Writing” at MSU this semester and was invited to speak on a panel with fellow instructors about teaching the class.  The panel was in a graduate-level class full of peers learning how to teach “Intro,” and they asked a lot of good questions.  One question in particular, why I structured the class the way I did, struck me in terms of how my own awareness of what is good writing has expanded in recent years.

I’m teaching this class poetry first, then fiction, and I set it up this way for a multitude of reasons.  For starters, last year saw me working in poetry classes, and I saw no reason to let so many great poems and examples fresh in my brain go to waste.  Second, I feel more confident in fiction and wanted to savor it in the second half of the semester rather than “get it out of the way” at the outset.  But most importantly, it’s because I feel many young writers approach poetry assuming it could / does contain central images, metaphors, specific language choices, “hidden” meaning, etc.  On the other hand, I feel less young writers approach prose with this idea in mind, never getting past the thought that a story is “just a story,” when really it could be so much more.  By discussing poetry and its elements first, students are able to keep those skills under their belts while approaching prose.

I think what we read (and what we write) should be diverse, and there’s no reason a little poetry shouldn’t be a part of that spectrum.  Knowing how to read poetry serves to open the world of prose so much beyond a notion of it’s “just a story.”  If one avoids poetry because they “don’t get it,” I wonder if they consider whether they’re really depriving themselves of a possible gateway to “getting it” altogether.  So don’t leave poetry out in the cold, or you may leave your ability to read / write great prose in a frozen standstill.

I’ll recommend some poems and poetry collections I enjoy in another post.  In the meantime, dear reader, see what you can find on your own and give it a fresh chance.
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[tags]poetry and prose, teaching creative writing, language choice[/tags]

Write about a character who knows they’re terrible at their job. Give this exercise fifteen minutes of your attention.

Write it up and see what happens,

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