Exercise is good for you. It keeps your heart healthy, helps you lose weight, and may one day enable you to outrun a hungry tiger. Writing exercises have similar benefits for your writing life. They can help illuminate aspects of character, breathe life into a dull setting, or plant the seed of a future story.
Category Archives: Blog
One Magician Watching Another Magician Doing Magic
Some time after I started seriously writing and studying the craft, I noticed I was having trouble really enjoying movies or getting caught up in the mystery and marvel of a book or a story. Throughout the entire experience, I realized that I had successfully plotted every event, character interaction, and motivation into a graph-like form in my head. It felt a bit like blasphemy, turning an artistic experience into a quasi-math. Yet, for better or worse, my head was full of quantifiable plot lines and character-arcs and dialogue patterns and motifs and symbols. Even watching plot based commercials was becoming exhausting.
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The R.O.I. of Writing
Imagine for a moment that an executive approached you with a job offer: there will be long hours staring over a computer, countless hours of research and reading, loads of letter-writing, mailing, emailing, editing, revising documents to conform to the recipient’s idiosyncratic wishes, networking with peers, professional development demands, travel, public speaking, conferences, teaching, and, of course, producing work. Successful candidates will be confident, inspiring, innovative, relentless, engaged with the world around them, emotionally and intellectually available, curious, inquisitive, and possess a strong backbone as well as the ability to refute or defend a position at a moment’s notice. By the way, there is little to no compensation for this position.
Letting Your Voice Be Heard
In the sixth grade, I became friends with a wonderful person—we’ll call her “Alice.” Alice is gifted with a phenomenal singing voice. Her mother was part of the music program at our church, and I often heard the personnel there speak with admiration about how lovely Alice’s voice was. I sat beside Alice in choir for several years, attended the same middle school, high school, and college, even rooming with her for two semesters. And looking back on all that time we spent together, I can honestly say that I have never heard Alice sing alone. In the choir room, with fifty other voices, yes. But by herself? Not once! I have no doubt that she can do so, and do so magnificently. Alice is not a prideful person, and those that have heard her sing are surely not all lying. But the truth is that Alice refuses to sing solo for just about anyone. I’ve always thought it was a shame.
My Story (and Other Bad Ideas)
After a good hour of typing away at my blog entry for this week, I clicked “Save” only to have it vanish into cyber-nothingness before my eyes. After the initial fury subsided, I was left with a queasy “maybe-somebody’s-trying-to-tell-me-something” feeling. While my blog-thoughts weren’t exactly original, they were what I’ve been pondering this week, but with my confidence shaken by the fateful “Invalid Entry” (the computer’s words, not mine), I’ll share only an abbreviated version of my original post.
Reflection and Shadow: The Nature of the Artist’s Reality
South85 is honored to introduce our very first guest blogger. Rick Mulkey is the director of the low-residency MFA Creative Writing program and the BFA Writing program at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including Toward Any Darkness and Before the Age of Reason.
Michio Kaku–”The mind of God is music resonating through ten dimensional hyperspace.”
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A Few Thoughts on Words
I guess you could say some are born to write.
As a child, when other kids were outside playing kickball, I was holed up in some corner of the house reading the dictionary. Yes, reading the dictionary.
Write the Damn Thing: How to Make Progress on Your First Draft (Or Make Your Title Needlessly Long)
First drafts, even good ones, are terrible. It doesn’t matter if you are in your first workshop, writing your master’s thesis, or starting your three hundred and seventy-second novel, it will be bad. This is not a reflection of your skill as a writer, but rather a fundamental law. The E=mc^2 of writing, if you will.
Knowing When To Give Up
Sometimes you realize that the story/chapter/poem/memoir/article that you’re writing is garbage. Not garbage in the sense that a few line edits might fix, but garbage as in this particular story/chapter/poem/memoir/article would be better if everyone involved just stopped what they were doing and took a nap. One of my stories (one I was particularly fond of) was completely torn apart after I sent it to an established writer for review. When I read this person’s suggestions (verbal beatings) I spent the rest of the day moping and feeling sorry for myself and realized my story was mostly garbage. A whole day later I sat back down, refreshed and determined to create anew and started to work on the story again. Only nothing would come out. The characters were bland, the plot was laughable at best, and all my words came out at a fourth grade level. Then my wife gave me some of the best advice I have been given as a writer to this day. She told me to give up on it (for a little while at least).
Readers Really Do Make Better Writers
I recently had an “ah-ha” moment while reading Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. In that moment, I finally understood what my teachers meant when they told me I needed to be a good reader if I wanted to be a good writer. Of course, I already understood logically why reading fiction leads to better writing: through reading good fiction we learn how to structure plots and develop characters and write dialogue, etc. But it was still blurry to me as to how reading a novel or short story would concretely enhance my craft.