Every writer THINKS they’ve come across
that old dry well at some point — some writers think that they visit that well
every other week. It doesn’t matter whether you are struggling with a novel or
accepting non-fiction assignments. There comes a point when all of your writing
seems to blend together and you desperately want a new voice, a new excitement
about the words you write.
Sit back and take a breath. Read the
comics, watch a bad TV show, take a walk, write a shopping list and then come back
to your notebook or keyboard or however you write and just start writing again.
If you need to, pull out one of your
old barely started manuscripts and figure out what you liked about it, discard
the rest and rebuild. Did you like a character, the location, or the time
period? That’s your starting point. Or play “what if” with one of your old
stories; ask what would be different if the bad guy was really the good guy, if
the story happened 25 years in the future, or if the story took place in a
different culture where customs would dictate different actions?
For non-fiction, if you previously wrote
about fashion trends or home furnishings, what’s different now? And what has
remained the same? Or if you read a story, watched a show, or even heard a news
broadcast, how would you rewrite it to make things turn out the way you would
want it to? Some authors and TV writers do it all the time — they write
alternative endings. Take an old story idea and make a flow chart showing all
of the decisions that were made, when you are done with that draw an
alternative path if the decisions had been different.
Every bit of action and life around
you, even if you think your life is boring, will provide you with the fodder to
fill a book. Take a piece of that conversation you overheard between two
strangers and write around it to build a story. Use an old childhood memory and
“give it” to one of your characters and see how well they incorporate it into
their “life”.
Never think that you can’t write, you
can.
Writing Exercise: Start
a short story (500-1500 words) using any one of the following: 1) There are
three couples at a dinner party, suddenly they hear a loud “explosion” outside
and the lights go out; 2) A couple is having a romantic date on the beach when
the sky suddenly turns black and the winds pick up; 3) A pregnant single woman
goes into labor in a strange town and goes to the local small clinic (the only
one in town), the obstetrician who enters the room to deliver her baby is the
man she shared a one-night stand nine months earlier and they never even asked
each other’s name.
Writing Prompt: Make
a list of “triggers” that make you immediately think of favorite childhood
memories (i.e.: the smell of cookies baking and remembering visits to grandma’s
house)
Challenge Assignment:
Find a short story (possibly from a magazine) and rewrite it to fit a different
genre. Keep as much of the original story as possible but play editor and edit
it to fit a different style of writing; you can make a romance into sci-fi, a
mystery into a children’s story, a fantasy into a historical novelette, etc.
