HeroJourneys

Here is the February writing prompt, from Darren Eggett:

On writing badly

It’s easy to write when you don’t care about quality. I’m not saying that quality isn’t important — it is. I am saying that sometimes we, as writers, get hung up on quality to the point that we stop putting words on paper.

There’s a lot of freedom, and a lot of fun, in deciding to write badly on purpose.

This exercise comes in 2 parts. First, select a genre and write the worst possible scene in that genre. Use stereotypes, passive sentence structure, whatever. Just make it as bad as you possibly can.

The office door was walked through by a leggy dame. A red cocktail dress was worn by her. So attractive was she that I didn’t notice the snub-nosed .55 that was held by her until my face was pointed at by it.

For the second part of this exercise you need A) a character; and B) an unescapable situation.

You’ve written yourself into a hole and don’t know how to get out. Happens to all of us. If you currently have a character stuck in a story, use that. If not, use the first thing that comes to mind.

When advertising agencies get stuck for new ideas they’ll often brainstorm the worst possible ideas (“Listerine also works great for getting sleep seeds out of baby’s tender eyes.”). After several minutes of bad ideas they’ll start looking for good ideas again. Often something generated as a bad idea becomes a springboard to a good idea going forward.

Set a timer for 20 minutes and write your character out of their problem in as many truly bad ways as possible. Actually do the writing — get into the character’s voice, give setting details, let us see the process they use to escape their trap. Try not to spend more than 3 minutes on any single solution — remember these are BAD ideas, so don’t worry about making the writing good — just get through as many as you can before the timer goes off.

Above all, HAVE FUN.

My writing group (the awesome The Pointe Writers Group) recently decided to do online writing prompts and exercises.

I thought a blog would be a great place to do them, to let anyone in who wanted to participate, and to create a fun little social interaction area.

Expectations: People do the exercise and then post it as a comment. Others are free to read and comment on those exercises.

So, here is the first one. I got this from James Maxey at our COWW (COdex Writer Workshop) in 2008. He called it a noun exercise for getting more concrete in writing.

Look around you where you are writing this. Pick specific items that you see and write them into a story. Try to get as many specific items as you can in 10 minutes.

Ready? Go!

I had a great time at LTUE (Life, The Universe, and Everything) – the BYU SciFi and Fantasy writing conference – this past weekend. I had been debating on whether to go, but finally decided to at kind of the last minute.

I really needed to hear Dan Wells’ presentation on plotting and pacing. It is exactly where I am right now in the tree.love novel. And it helped me get through the little block I was having. I was able to get some great brainstorming in during some of the more, shall we say, content-light presentations of the conference.

I’ll share my notes about this soon.

I recently started a writing group in my area. We critiqued each other’s stuff for the first time earlier this month, and I have to say that it was a great experience. It got me moving on my writing and should make it so that I write more regularly (creatively, not necessarily on my blogs ).

In February, a couple of us (the Founders) got together to come up with guidelines for our group.

Dave Farland had sent out several emails last year about writing groups, so I went through those again and pulled out the good nuggets of information.

In any case, we set up some rules about how we’re going to run the thing and our expectations. Basically, we expect people to write something new every month instead of just rehashing the same old thing again and again. We also don’t want critiques to get out of hand and so will use something similar to Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp method (which I believe is also used at Odyssey and/or Clarion). Everyone will get a turn and there will not be any cross-talking or commenting by the author.

We also decided to include a short writing exercise at the beginning of each one so that we can improve our craft and get our brains working.

Finally, we decided (for various reasons that I will not enumerate at the present time) to call our group The Point Writing Group.

We are open to anyone who is serious about writing and improving themselves.

So, if you live in northern Utah county or southern Salt Lake county (in Utah, of course), then we’d be happy to have you.

I had my classes do a lightning write activity this week, and I realized that I never shared the one I participated in at the Codex retreat (CoWW).

For this activity, you need a group (a group of 6 works pretty well). Each person has about a minute to write the beginning to a story. Then, the stories get passed around from one person to the next after a set limit of time (that gradually increases so as to allow people to read what has already been written). Finally, the original story starter gets their paper back and they get to finish the story.

See the story, after the break.

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I just got back from teaching my Writing for Digital Media class, and I went through Orson Scott Card’s 1001 ideas in an hour with them. It worked out really well. I’m not nearly as good as OSC at pulling more and more ideas out, but we came up with some doozies. Very cool ideas.

The main one was about an alien coming to earth to desroy it since she is the last surviving member of her species and world. But she falls in love with the president of the world, who is 96, but she gives him a treatment that makes him look 30. Then, they must contend with the destroyer alien coming to finish the job he started with her planet.

Yeah, they were in a weird mood today. But, it was fun, and we got out some good ideas as we learned about brainstorming and loglines.

I am really enjoying learning all this new lingo and style in the digital media world.

Codex Writer’s Workshop.

I anticipated this event for a long time.

The first few days were for critiques of novels and short stories, as well as some class sessions on writing and being a writer. We had the famous Ellen Datlow critique our short stories. She was very insightful and gave lots of comments to everyone. We also had David Coe come for dinner one night; after which we picked his brain with questions.

The last week or so was just a retreat time where we could relax and write and explore Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I’ll post more later about what happened and what I learned.

I have been doing better at keeping up with doing book reviews than I have with doing any actual posting here, but I am trying to change that a bit, especially now that I am done teaching at UVSC.

I have decided that I am going to change around how I do the book reviews, as well. On Goodreads I’ll continue to give my general thoughts and opinions, but here I am going to start analyzing the stories for how well they make use of Setting, Plot, Character, Conflict, and Text (style and word choice). After all, these are the things that John Brown taught me about for creating Zing, so I should be paying closer attention to them.

Of course, this won’t work perfectly for every book I read. I read lots of non-fiction as well, so that should be analyzed differently. From the non-fiction, I hope to get most of the same kinds of Zing, but only indirectly as they give me ideas or research notes.

So, be on the lookout for these new reviews within the next week of any book I finish (after all, I’m in the middle of 10 books right now).

I’ve just finished Well of Ascension, and it was awesome – so much so that I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past week (which is why I haven’t posted as much here as I normally will). I wrote a little review in my reviews area.

I’ve been enjoying the story itself, but I was also looking at how well Brandon Sanderson choose plot twists and ideas. He definitely did not seem to be pulling from the cliche shelf (of course, I’m not thoroughly versed in Fantasy any more, but I was kept guessing all the time).

I’ve lately been trying to get the Transfer Loss novel going. I did finish NaNoWriMo, but that ended up being mostly just lots of short stories stuck together in one long document. So, I have been trying to plan it out and think it through a little more. But things just weren’t flowing well. I have lots of cool ideas, but I’m just going to put it aside for awhile and focus on something else.

In fact, I have started thinking again about Moon Shadow more seriously. That is the story I wrote as a flash fiction piece and then submitted for Boot Camp. I am working on the beginning. Orson Scott Card was right about it starting in the wrong place. I started a 1000 ideas in an hour session for it, and came up with some really interesting ideas. It was a one idea story at first, so a couple of these things should really make it deeper and more interesting.

I haven’t done very well at writing here regularly, but I’m trying to make amends for that starting today.

I started a blog for the classes I teach, and so that has started getting me in the habit of doing this regularly. Plus, this is a great place to think through ideas and what I’m doing with writing.

I’ll go into more detail later this week, but for now, I’m excited to get back to this. I hope it helps me, and anyone else who is just getting started as a writer and happens upon this blog (I know, not likely to happen, but one can always dream ? )

That’s all I’m going to write for now since it is getting late. But I will say that I’m excited to start reading the second book in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series (The Well of Ascension). I really enjoyed the first one, and also Elantris. It is really cool that he will be writing the final book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, as well. Way to go Brandon!