It all starts with your characters
from 365 Affirmations for the Writer
January 22
Write Every Day
If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The
consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered
by this daily reoccurrence.
― Walter Mosley, New York Times, “Writers on Writing”
January 23
Write Every Day
“I know I have a novel in me,” I
often hear people say. “But how can I get it out?”
The answer is, always is, every
day. It doesn’t matter what time of day you work, but you have to work every
day because creation, like life, is always slipping away from you. You must
write every day, but there’s no time limit on how long you have to write.
One day you might read over what
you’ve done and think about it. You pick up the pencil or turn on the computer,
but no new words come. That’s fine. Sometimes you can’t go further. Correct a
misspelling, reread a perplexing paragraph, and then let it go. You have
re-entered the dream of the work, and that’s enough to keep the story alive for
another 24 hours.
The next day you might write for
hours; there’s no way to tell. The goal is not a number of words or hours spent
writing. All you need to do is to keep your heart and mind open to the work.
― Walter Mosley, New York Times, “Writers on Writing”
January 24
Revisiting the Previous Day’s Work
While writing a long novel, every
day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a
consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a
novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that,
ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage
concurrent with all the others.
― Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times, “Writers on Writing”
January 25
First Drafts
It’s not the writing that matters
at this stage, just getting it out.
― Jane Hertenstein
Julia Cameron in The
Artist’s Way has trademarked the phrase “Morning Pages” or simply free
writing. Every morning, first thing, sit down with a blank book or blank page
and simply blather. This kind of mind mapping or stream of consciousness doesn’t
have to make sense, be sequential, for follow a theme or arc. It is about
letting your mind unravel, unwind its trouble and worries and prepare the
writer for more focused work or to unleash gems that can be expanded upon or
explored at length.
January 26
Books
― Richard Ford
January 27
Books
Re-read some of your favorite writers and identify what it
is that engages you. What first captured your head and heart? Was it the prose,
the plot, the characters? Certain kinds of stories draw us in—those will be the
ones you’ll want to emulate.
January 28
Books
I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as
long as he finishes the book.
— Roald Dahl
January 29
Characters
It
begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins
to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying
to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
— William Faulkner
January 30
Characters
— Kate Braverman,
January 31
Characters
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have
created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created – nothing.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, from the opening line of his 1926 short story, “The Rich
Boy”
It all starts with your characters. Joyce Carol Oates gives
her students an assignment of simply writing a conversation between two people.
After one page of dialogue you get a sense of who they are, after 10 pages you
can begin to know them pretty well. Write a page or two of dialogue without any
tags or without identifying the characters and see if a reader can distinguish
between the two speakers.
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