Category Archives: Writing Experiments

Friday Writing Experiment No. 10: Saint’s Day

by Andrew | Leave a comment

St Andrew

Today is St Andrew’s Day. He is the patron saint of Scotland, Greece, Russia, Sicily, and Romania. Andrew was one of the twelve disciples, and the founder of the Church of Byzantium. He was apparently crucified by Emperor Nero, but before that sorry end he is said to have brought the boy with the five loaves and two fishes to Jesus. I always loved that miracle. I ended up loving my food, too.

Various traditions associated with St Andrew’s Day involve single women looking for lurve, e.g., dreaming of your future husband on St Andrew’s Eve. Or husbands coming from the direction where you hear dogs barking. Or husbands being suggested by the shadow of molten wax. Or throwing shoes at doors.

Some Romanian traditions involve wolves, who, it’s said, can eat all the animals they want on that day. Apparently they can speak too on St Andrew’s Day, but anyone who hears them will DIE.

(Isn’t it weird that if you repeat your own name to yourself often enough you start wondering if that really is your name?! Maybe that is some sort of magic too.)

Patron of wolves, ropemakers, and fisherman. A motley selection. And some bizarre superstitions.

This week’s writing experiment tasks you on a bit of research into your own name’s saint, or your saint’s day (the feast day associated with your birthday). Or just make one up: create your own fireside goddess, or household deity, or holy man or woman. Someone to look over you. Maybe you can even print out a picture and create a little shrine of associated objects.

Then, write a story or a poem about your own saint or saint’s day. Something fun, something with life, something in some way or other holy, and wholly your own.

 

Friday Writing Experiment No. 9: A Word

by Andrew | Leave a comment

Take a word that seems current to you: fox, or chase, or November, or ash, or drink, or because, or whatever, or no, or nail, or index. Choose something new, emerging, fresh. Probably not something you’ve dealt with before.

Then, do some research on that word. Look it up in all six dictionaries you own (you do own six dictionaries, I assume?), look it up in a thesaurus, look it up in dictionaries of foreign languages, in an etymological dictionary, in the glossary of specialist reference works, in an encyclopedia, on Wikipedia. Google it. Take a page of notes (a page, no more – it’s okay, you can write really small if you have to).

That could go on forever, so ration yourself. It can be good to place a time limit on your brainstorming, e.g., fifteen minutes. (You can do more, but a short, sharp hit of looking can be effective for clarifying the thought process and enlivening your instincts.)

Then: without referring to those references again, and only using your page of notes, write a page about that word, or embodying that word, but without using that word. Prose, poetry, what you will. Just don’t use your chosen word, or variations thereof, at all.

Continue at your leisure.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 59: Words Words Words uses generated words in a particular way where this delving into word history might become relevant. And you can also apply this process specifically to your revising: Friday Writing Experiment No. 60: Word Power.

PS Yes, we took a week off last week. Because we can. It’s not the Every Friday Writing Experiment.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 8: NaNoWriYear

by Andrew | Leave a comment

Okay, okay, that was rather a cranky post I made yesterday about the start/onslaught of NaNoWriMo. So in an effort to be nice/compassionate/not bitter, this weekend’s writing experiment is devoted to the idea of writing a novel within a specific span of time.

But here, let’s be a bit more measured. Patient, realistic. Let’s think about a longer span. I’m suggesting a year (which is the duration of the Telegraph’s Novel in a Year – super piece by Louise Doughty at that link). Or maybe, if you want something a bit more concentrated and can spare the time, three months, or six months, or even nine months. But make it one of those spans of time – multiples of three, magic numbers after all – to be started at some finite point in the future, e.g., 1 January 2013. (I’m assuming we all survive the end of the world that was apparently not prophesied by the Mayans for December 2012 – if you are worried about that, though, do NaNoWriMo, and then use the first 22 days of December for revisions. And then PRAY, while the rest of us look forward to Christmas.)

So here goes – a few suggestions:

* This weekend, find a couple of hours to plan some bare bones of your novel. Use those two hours wisely, and with a deadline.

* To start, brainstorm. Write lists, draw mind maps of things your novel will contain.

* Answer this question: What is the purpose of this novel? What is your intention? The answer might be slow in emerging, and this might be something you need to revisit throughout. Allow it to mutate, if need be.

* Then start to shape your narrative content. People, places, scenes. Prioritise, itemise.

* Create a structure out of this content – e.g., a three-act structure. You don’t have to outline in detail, unless you are an effective outliner, but perhaps you can start to divide your story into three acts, and work out what goes into each act. And to get yourself started, maybe just map out some of the chapters or scenes in the first act, to get yourself going. You can also think about writing patchwork-style, with sections from anywhere in the book that will be pulled together later.

* Then create a schedule of action: deadlines for parts or chapters evenly scattered throughout the year. Give yourself a start date, and an end date, and work out how much writing you need to do each week, for example. Maybe also build in some time for research – you might be able to start that sooner, in fact, but also factor in an end time for finishing initial research and then a start date for the actual writing. Research can, if you let it, go on forever. The goal: a complete first draft by the end of three/six/nine/twelve months.

* And then the work will begin (1 January 2014? 1 April 2013?): the processes of revising and self-editing.

Of course, you’re going to need to think about all the other things a novel needs: if you don’t understand what’s meant by three-act structure, or want to know more about creating strong characters, or using voice or point of view, or simply need some prompts and direction, you might need to create a course of self-study (resources are available everywhere – start here, or your local library). Or even take a course. I’ve taught such courses in the past, and its best to note that such short courses are usually not about writing a novel in, e.g., six or eight weeks, but about six or eight weeks of equipping you with the tools to write a novel. And then you go away and write it. A concentrated month can be helpful. But remember too that writing a novel is not a race, and few of us are sprinters.

(Updated 26 October 2013.)

 

Friday Writing Experiment No. 7: Ghost Story

by Andrew | 1 Comment

Tis the witching season.

* Write a story or a poem about a ghost.

* Include some trove that you uncover via a chance operation. Either: (a) Reach for the nearest book to you, open it at a previously decided page (‘I’ll open this at page 41’), and select the first interesting word. Or: (b) Look out of (or into, if you’re outdoors) the nearest window, and choose the first interesting object to strike your attention. Or: (c) use some random reckoning of your own. Then somehow wrap your story/poem around the word/object that you found.

* Write by candlelight, or the spectral glow of your computer screen (there are ghosts in the machine).

Friday Writing Experiment No. 6: Writing Good Sentences

by Andrew | Leave a comment

We can come up with brilliant ideas, storylines, and characters, but they’re unlikely to be much use unless we can bring them to life with elegant, vibrant, cogent, taut, muscular sentences.

I.e., unless we can write.

The book I recommend more than any other to writers and students is Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax, which is a lively and informative overview of all the grammar and usage we probably did not learn in English classes. I’m keen to acquire a copy of her new book Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch (one on the way, or rather, I’m on the way to one), which is – ahhhh! – devoted to verbs, those powerhouses of the sentence. I hope to review both of these books in the near future, but meanwhile take a look at Constance Hale’s newly designed website and blog, which has a ton of useful resources.

And inspired by St Constance’s love for ‘wicked good prose’ (and a day late – oops!), this week’s writing experiment is dedicated to writing powerful sentences.

Take any interesting sentence you’ve written lately – interesting as in a sentence you were pleased with, or maybe it’s a sentence that gave you a problem because it felt a bit clunky or did not quite express what you wanted. Or perhaps it’s just any old sentence from an email, or you can borrow one from someone else.

And if you are feeling bold and have the time: take a whole paragraph.

Now perform at least five different operations on that sentence/paragraph, i.e., rewrite it or modify it in at least five different ways.

Some suggestions:

* Change the word choices subtly, e.g., use a thesaurus to bring different shades of meaning out of each word in the sentence.

* Change the word choices radically, e.g., replace each word with another word that’s an equivalent part of speech acquired randomly – perhaps replace its first noun with the first noun you find in a newspaper story, then replace the next noun with the next noun you find in that same story, and so on. Understand word order, and words as placeholders of content.

* Express the action using passive verbs instead of active, or vice-versa.

* Remove all adjectives.

* Remove all adverbs.

* Change nouns to proper nouns, where you can (e.g., change ‘tea’ to ‘PG Tips’).

* If the/a sentence has more than one verb, remove unnecessary verbs (purging yourself of linking verbs and auxiliary verbs). If all the verbs seem necessary, let them take turns at being the only verb in the sentence. Change the verb if it seems necessary.

* Feel free to extend or develop sentences using content from other sentences from the original text, e.g., merging it with a nearby sentence to create a compound sentence and/or a complex sentence.

* Extend sentences by using a co-ordinating conjunction and another clause to make compound sentences. What effect does that have?

* Extend sentences by using a subordinating conjunction and a dependent clause to make a complex sentences. What effect does that have?

* Double the length of your sentence, without changing the basic meaning.

* Halve the length of your sentence, without changing the basic meaning.

* Rewrite your sentence/paragraph as a text message or a Tweet (under 280 characters, or 140 in old money).

* Add more life to your sentence/paragraph.

* Think abstractly. Conceive of your original sentence/paragraph as an action: right now, is it a kiss, a kick, a projection, a hinge, or some other gesture? How can you make it into a different action: a flight, a decoration, a flick, a punch?

* Assess the elemental quality of your sentence/paragraph: is it mostly Fire, Water, Air, or Earth? Like an alchemist, translate it into another element through your sentence structure and word choices. Aim to keep close to the original meaning, perhaps, but also explore how the sense can be shifted.

* Invent your own sentence operations, and share them with the class. Let your imagination go a bit wild with sentences.

I suggest you do these exercises by hand in a notebook. You can of course do on screen as well. In fact, it might be interesting to explore these processes of composition in different media: on the screen of your phone, on a blackboard, on Post-its.

And then repeat over with a different sentence/paragraph. It can be a good constraint, though, to use the same sentence/paragraph for several different operations in order to explore the possibilities.

If you need to look anything up, and don’t have your own Sin and Syntax (why not?!), here are some useful resources:

* Mantex study notes on English language

* Parts of Speech Overview – from Purdue’s Online Writing Lab

* Definitions of Basic Sentence Parts