About Storywriting

Another Idea to Get You Started

We all know that sometimes we just can’t seem to get going. Here’s an idea that might help: Take the pressure off and think of what you are doing as simply an exercise.

I’ll give you an example.

One of my favorite things to do after reading a story in The New Yorker is to follow the little editor’s note at the end of the story. The formula for the note will be, NEWYORKER.COM [Name of author] on [Some topic relevant to the story you just read]. For example, NEWYORKER.COM Lilly Crabtree on family holidays. Easier than going to the website is to simply google the writer’s name and the topic. This morning I googled “Claire Keegan on drama versus tension” and read a short, pithy interview with Keegan on her story “So Late in the Day.”

I recommend both the story and the interview. It’s a reminder that one way to start a new story is to make an exercise of it. Keegan wrote the original draft as an example for her writing workshops. She wanted to show her students that you could write something full of tension but without a dramatic event. Later, she decided to take it beyond the teaching-example stage— “before someone else did.” Putting herself through the exercise of creating an example usable in class gave her the seed to grow into a full story.

There must be a hundred ways of doing something similar.

Can you write a narrator who is talking extra fast? See Stephen Dixon’s “Movies” Notice how he handles dialogue and paragraphing. This is what I did to write “The Sandwich Shop.”

Can you write a scene where your protagonist goes into and then out of and then back into consciousness? See Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Notice the shifts between when she is thinking and talking and when she only thinks she is talking.

And then there’s the grandmother of all writing exercises, the Show/Don’t Tell game, what I call Hints and Clues when I teach kids storywriting. Hemingway said that the most important part of the story is what you don’t say. How do actions and speech give away emotion? This exercise asks you to write an emotional scene only by implication. You are thinking of an emotion your character is feeling, but you don’t allow yourself to use that word or a synonym for it. Then you show it to someone and say, “Can you guess what emotion my character is feeling?” If your friend guesses correctly on the first try, you get an A.

Any one of these exercises, or one you invent yourselves, will give you enough to get moving on a new story.