writing advice from your friendly neighborhood possessor of a bachelorβs degree in creative writing:
you donβt have to write the story in order. donβt wait to write a scene or a line you are excited about thatβs toward the end. write it first. write down bits of dialogue that come to you. donβt be afraid to spin a story like some kinda bizarre quilt, plucking here and there, pulling together edges where they fit best.
donβt write what you know in the ways that they tell you. write what you want to know or what you imagine you could know if you were someone else and lived somewhere else and had entirely different problems and traumas. write like you know even though you donβt. add little grounding details that you do know so maybe theyβll believe you.
break more rules than that. use adverbs and adjectives and metaphors. use said or use alternatives to said that make writing professors grimace. learn the rules and defiantly crush them. openly and viscerally.
donβt be afraid to skip boring parts. condense them to one line. donβt want to describe how they get back from the club or what exactly was said in their discussion or get stuck on a scene that feels like slogging through a swamp of very boring things happening? thatβs one sentence now, neatly described and then carry on to the fun parts.
when thereβs a lot of dialogue, a lot of people donβt even read the bit that comes after the end quotes, donβt worry. theyβve already jumped to the next line. donβt be afraid to completely drop everything after the quotes and just roll with nakey dialogue. it is very freeing and also fuck hemingway, you can do better that that.
donβt stop asking what if. donβt approach writing like βwell what would make a good story, how do i give these characters conflict, how do i make some grand statement about human nature here that connects to this other author and this other dead poet and is very cleverβ just ask what if and ask it again.
donβt be afraid to be derivative. all writing is derivative. this idea that we gotta be wholly original is very very new in the scheme of human writing. take anotherβs work and make it your own and ask what if about it. hell, write fanfiction and have a good time with it. those characters are yours now, authorβs intention be damned. kill that author. you have stories to tell.
the line between poetry and prose is very very thin to the point of not mattering. donβt ever tell me βi canβt write poetryβ when you hand me a paragraph from a story that absolutely sings with the way the words fit together. banish your assumption of what poetry is and write it. donβt tell me you donβt βget poetryβ. some part of you does and always has. write poetry.
just write. or if not write, take notes. or if not take notes, then read things that inspire you. or if not read (my brain is too fast most days for reading), just let your brain wander. if your brain wanders too far and gets lost, you might find something worth writing there.
itβs ok not to write. not to be writing. not to love writing anymore. itβs ok to have loved it so dearly and used words and stories to survive for so long, then to have that leak away. itβs ok if it was stolen from you by professors, by sharp words from peers, by reading lists and ways you were told you were meant to feel, by public readings and workshops, by one on one meetings with men who told you too late they should have done better by you and your writing, by the fear of a future spent networking and churning and emailing and preening and never writing, not the ways you wanted to. or if you just stopped writing. or if you never started. itβs ok not to write.
and then, itβs ok to start again
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