writing advice from your friendly neighborhood possessor of a bachelor’s degree in creative writing:
you don’t have to write the story in order. don’t wait to write a scene or a line you are excited about that’s toward the end. write it first. write down bits of dialogue that come to you. don’t be afraid to spin a story like some kinda bizarre quilt, plucking here and there, pulling together edges where they fit best.
don’t 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 don’t. add little grounding details that you do know so maybe they’ll 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.
don’t be afraid to skip boring parts. condense them to one line. don’t 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? that’s one sentence now, neatly described and then carry on to the fun parts.
when there’s a lot of dialogue, a lot of people don’t even read the bit that comes after the end quotes, don’t worry. they’ve already jumped to the next line. don’t 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.
don’t stop asking what if. don’t approach writing like “well 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 clever” just ask what if and ask it again.
don’t 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 another’s 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, author’s 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. don’t ever tell me “i can’t write poetry” 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. don’t tell me you don’t “get poetry”. 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.
it’s ok not to write. not to be writing. not to love writing anymore. it’s ok to have loved it so dearly and used words and stories to survive for so long, then to have that leak away. it’s 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. it’s ok not to write.
and then, it’s ok to start again
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
amandla
areudirty
snowghoul
