Three Writing Prompts!
George Saunders, Rene Denfeld, and Brandon Taylor offer guidance for when you want to write but can't figure out where to begin!
Hello Beyonders!
Somehow, it’s September! The weather in Michigan has become astoundingly perfect: sunny, crisp, and much much cooler. Delilah’s mobility issues have eased a bit, which, as my mom would say, does my heart good. And there’s still plenty of sun for Rudy to loll about in.
The world continues to be difficult and confusing. Loads of beauty and joy and happiness but also suffering, fear, myriad lies, and fury-making. I find writing to be one of my greatest tools in sorting through so many gigantic emotions and I know many of you in this community feel the same. It allows us to connect more deeply with ourselves, with others, and to better understand the world. In short, it’s healing.
But getting started can be hard!
With that in mind, I gathered a few of the fantastic prompts from the Craft Advice series. I’m so proud of this collection of interviews with some of our finest living writers. The insight and skill offered is MFA level. In fact, many readers have said it’s better! And who am I to argue with readers! I’ve learned so much speaking with these gifted souls and I’m happy and honored to share their wisdom with all of you!
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But first: I’ve been tossing around the idea of teaching a series of writing classes on Zoom. They’d most likely be an hour and a half, every other week.
I’ve taught Creative Writing for decades: When I lived in NYC at Rutgers, The New School, Gotham, and private workshops; when I moved to Michigan at the local community college and private workshops. Each class would focus on a key element of storytelling, such as Setting, POV, and Dialogue. These skills can be applied to fiction or nonfiction. I’ve published widely, hold an MFA from Columbia, and am represented by Andrianna deLone at CAA.
If something like this might interest you, can you email me or let me know in the comments!
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Now for some incredibly inspiring responses to my closing Craft Advice question:
So many readers of Beyond are writers, do you have a prompt you find really helpful?
Happy writing!! Let me know how it goes in the comments!
xJane
A Little Seussian
Yes! You write a 200-word story. Not 199. Not 201. 200. And you can only use 50 words to do it. There should be some time limit, like 30 minutes or so. With my students, we do it in class, and they read them aloud afterwards. So it's very annoying and unpleasant.
Then you start to write. You say, “the cat had scurvy.” One: the. Two: cat. Three: had. Four: scurvy. So you’ve used four of your words. You keep going and pretty soon you find that you're just being a mathematician. You’re thinking, “I’ve got to use the word scurvy three more times,” that kind of thing. So the pieces are real misshapen in a way. They end up being a little Seussian, because there's a lot of repetition.
In my experience, people write stories in response to this exercise that are quite different than the ones that they usually write. They're often funnier. And they're always shaped. They always have escalation. Why does that happen? I still don't know. But my theory is that your habituated approach gets disturbed by this because you're playing a game, you're bookkeeping. It disrupts your usual approach. If you've written for a while, without even meaning to, you'll have settled into a familiar mindset: Here's how I write my stories. This exercise goes, “Oh, no, you don't!”
The results are often not as good as your real work, but they're different. And if nothing else, it teaches you that you contain multitudes. With a sturdy constraint, you're forced to sound like a different writer. So it’s liberating. You're accessing a different part of your talent.
It goes so against the rule of cleaning up word repetition. This is encouraging it.
You have to. There's no way to get around it. And what happens is the words end up meaning a little more than they should because you reuse them and they come to signify in interesting ways. I’ve had real good results with that in class. I had one student who went home and wrote ten of those, but with the same two characters, but different 200 word lists, and it became a really coherent, short story.
— George Saunders [read George’s full interview]
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Empathizing With The Offender
One I’ve used for people writing about trauma is to write a page or two from the offender’s point of view when they were a child.
Oh, I like that.
People can write an entire book and they don't once step into the point of view of the offender. Not honestly, not accurately. If they are writing fiction, especially genre, they’ve often made the offender a monster. If they are writing memoir they might be avoiding empathizing with the offender. I know I would struggle with this if I wrote memoir. But to not have a realistic, founded idea of the offender in your work is a big hole in the story.
This exercise can illustrate some things to you. Maybe you don't know anything about the offender, and it's time that you learn something. Or you might be very resistant to being compassionate towards the causes of their behavior. Maybe you feel an urge to turn in them into a super-duper monster. It can be an illuminating exercise of our own barriers and where we might need to do some work about how we feel about this person.
— Rene Denfeld [read Rene’s full interview]
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Blending Interior With Exterior
Oh, I love writing prompts. I give my students writing prompts all the time. Something that I like to tell my students is to write a scene in which a character has received really, really bad news. Say they go to a coffee shop after getting this really bad news, and they're looking around. Write that scene. And then rewrite it conveying the same amount of information but without any interiority.
Oh!
Yes. And then if you're really ambitious, rewrite the scene with only interiority, with very little physical detail.
I do that to train my students to think about the interplay between the inside and the outside, but also how one can convey emotional information and narrative information through physicality and through physical space and through filtering through a character’s perspective. And how sometimes you've got to let the interiority overflow and overrun everything.
In the end, it’s the blend of the two?
Yes. First you write the blended one and whatever naturally you would do. And then you write one version, focusing only on the physical, and one version, focusing only on the interior. Doing that helps you see, “Oh, this is how I would like it.” Then you're able to rewrite it in a blended way with a deeper understanding of the interior and the exterior, if you so choose. Sometimes you find that stripping out all the physicality makes it feel more visceral and alive. And sometimes you find that writing it more on the physical aspect has more impact, because you're trying harder to get it across without recourse to interior narration.
— Brandon Taylor [read Brandon’s full interview]
In case you missed last month’s list of joys, here you go!!
Thank you, Jane. I'm printing this off for future reference. Such great and creative ideas! I am also interested in the writing courses.
I'd be interested in learning more about the writing classes.