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You thought in different patterns, too, focused around daily concerns and your need for your mother and father. You used words and expressions you no longer use. You had physical habits you 've left behind.
Sure, there are still similarities between the girl you were and the woman you are —we remain the same in many ways, no matter what our age —but the eight year old you were was a thinker and speaker set apart from the mature adult reading this column.
Too often I’ve met writers who have started their projects five or six times, each beginning beckoning more exotically than the last. Yet each time these writers peter out before they get to the center of the story. They keep at it, though, new beginning after new beginning. They ARE writing, it’s true, but the project never gets done, because they keep reinventing the opening. Over, and over, and over.
Writing Narrative Nonfiction: Crafting A Narrative From Life Experience -- Part II After you have chosen one of the events from your life, after which everything changed, you begin the work every memoirist must step up to: gathering your material. You chart the course you followed as you came to terms with that life-altering event, taking note of the potent memories that rise--the people you encountered and the events that filled your days as you
walked a new landscape, finding your way through a time of change and transition.
Part of being successful at memoir writing is realizing from the get-go
that you have to limit the material you cover, not only to keep the
composition of reasonable length, but to create a story that rivets readers
to the page. Too much wandering through stuff that isn't interesting, or
doesn't contribute to dramatic pull, is a quick path to unsuccessful
memoir--that is, a story that cures insomnia.
Writing Narrative Nonfiction: Publishing Your Personal Stories Many of you have dreams of publishing your personal stories. You have dreams of a forum in which to be heard. You have dreams of fame and fortune coming to you via your writing.
Whatever your dreams may be, you have to first wedge your foot into the publishing door. Most books and teachers tell you to write a story and then query an editor about whether he'd like to see that story. Or, they suggest, query first before it's even written. Then wait, hopefully, for a positive reply.
Writing Narrative Nonfiction: Following the Passion I am on the road right now, teaching a workshop in Tucson, Arizona, and last night as we gathered in the seminar room of this cozy resort, I was once again reminded of the bedrock of writing about your life.
It does not matter who you are of how much experience you have with writing. If you want to capture your personal stories, do this: Follow the passion.
Art of Fiction: Your Fiction’s Hardworking First Paragraph: Part III: In the Mood In my first column this year, I showed how your fiction’s hardworking first paragraph sets the pace, and in my second, we looked at how the seeds of everything that comes after are planted in not merely your first paragraph, but your first sentence. This month, we’ll look at your hardworking first paragraph’s third duty: creating the mood.
Art of Fiction: Your Fiction’s Hardworking First Paragraph: Part II: Planting the Seeds In my January column, I showed you how your first paragraph should set the pace for the rest of your fiction. Now, let’s look at how that same hardworking first paragraph — I might even go further and say first sentence — plants the seeds for everything that comes after, including the seeds of the ending.
To see how this works, let’s get up and go to the bookshelves — mine, since they’re nearby.
Art of Fiction: Your Fiction’s Hardworking First Paragraph: Part I: Setting the Pace You already know that your fiction’s first paragraph needs to knock ’em dead so they’ll keep on reading, and reading, and reading. But your first paragraph does a whole lot of other work as well: It introduces your protagonist, sets up the situation, reveals the setting, starts the suspense, and finally, sets the pace for the rest of your fiction. That’s a lot of work for a mere paragraph, but when it works, the reader won’t realize how much you’re doing.
READING AS A WRITER As a kid, I carried home such an armload of books from the library that I could barely see over the pile. A crossing guard once reported me to my mother.
“Your daughter will be run over if she keeps reading those many books.”
It was more like I was overrun by books, but quite willingly. Books were life to me. They were so much more interesting that anything anyone around me had to say, including my teachers.
Throughout my adulthood, I read voraciously. At all times I kept a pocketbook in my pocket in case I had to stand on a line or get on a bus or do anything else that might open a window of time to reading. I read and ate. I read and took a bath. Sometimes, depending on whom I was speaking to, I read and talked on the phone at the same time.
But in my thirties when I began to write, the pace of my reading screeched to only a few pages an hour. Books that I would have gone through in a blink, I now stared at for hours, trying to learn just how the author created his magic. I’d look for certain specific things, and when I found them, I’d really take note. I’d underline, highlight, write comments in the margins, and fill up all the blank space between chapters with copying whole passages from the book. A book became a lesson plan for me, my teachers, my guides.
Dialogue I’m in line at Macy’s waiting to return a frame someone gave me as a gift. (Why does everyone think a frame makes such a great gift anyway?)
The woman on line ahead of me says, “It looked like rain when I came in. Was it raining when you came in?”
“No,” I say.
“Well, it certainly looked like it,” she insists.
“Oh, then I guess it will,” I say because it all seems to important to her.
The White Page What could set a writer’s heart pounding more than staring at a white page, worrying how to begin writing, what to say?
No matter how much you’ve published, each time you start out, you feel like a novice all over again. Nothing you’ve ever done before seems to help. In fact, former accomplishments may get in the way because you worry that you’ll never be able to write anything as good as the piece that you just received a Pushcart Prize for. (Wouldn’t that be grand?)
Using Digression To Enlarge a Story In
the introduction to The Art of the Personal
Essay (Anchor Books, 1995), p. XXXVII, Philip Lopate writes what is
true for a lot of creative writing, not just essays. “The essayist tries to surround
something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—by coming
at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly
digressive spiral taking us to the heart of the matter.” Two pages later, he adds that digression
“serves both structural and comic functions.”
The Writer as Rewriter One day I was working at my computer in my living room when I heard a voice behind me. My husband wasn’t home. My children had left for school an hour ago. They had probably left the door unlocked again!
“You’ve set off a silent alarm,” I bluffed whoever was behind me in the strongest voice I could muster. “The police are on their way.”
When my novel was first published, I got a call from a neighbor. I thought she’d called to congratulate me. I felt so touched.
After a hello, she blurted out, “How can I get published?”
“Oh, I didn’t know you wrote,” I said.
“I don’t,” she replied.
I stood there, phone to my ear, silent, blinking. When I came out of my startled state, I said, “The first step is to start writing.”
Now there was silence on her end.
Neil Flowers
Jump_Cut: On Screenwriting In May, reader Carey Abney wrote to ask whether it was possible to structure commercial feature films in ways other than in three "acts." He heard cinegurus recommend creating alternatives to three-act structure. Carey wondered if such as thing were possible.
As we all learned in English Comp 101, every good essay should start out with a declaration of its intent and then prove what it says. Yes?
So here goes, out on a long limb: No, Carey, three-act structure is the very being and essence of stories, and that applies to feature film narratives. Those cinegurus are talking through their hats—or through the end opposite their hats.
Jump_Cut: On Screenwriting Carey Abney is from Philadelphia, an active duty ITSN (Navy) residing in Newport News, VA, and a new reader of this column. He has sent in a question pertinent to all of us who write feature films and hope that they will be sold and produced. It will take two or three columns to reply fully to Mr. Abney. Here's his question.
Dear Mr. Flowers,
I have a question about your most recent column regarding three-act structure. Since I'm new to screenwriting, I'm constantly studying and researching how to write a great screenplay. In many books about screenwriting,
the three-act structure is strongly recommended. But in contrast to books, I hear many writers, producers, and contest judges talk about juggling things around, and sometimes moving completely away from chronological structure in order to write an intriguing story. I feel the three-act structure is a great foundation for creating any sort of story, but is there more than one way to skin a cat?
Jump_Cut: On Screenwriting his column marks the one-year anniversary of “Jump_Cut.”
In case you have just joined us, this seems like an appropriate time to look back and to sum up where we have come from and where we are headed.
JUMP_CUT: ON SCREENWRITING For the last few columns, we have been examining acts I and II of feature film structure. We took a good look at High Noon, because its structure is so transparent and therefore easy to see.
Now let's have a closer look at Collateral, an excellent, contemporary L.A. noir thriller that would seem on the surface to be light years removed in every way from a 55-year-old Western. The two films are, indeed, very different in genre, locale, and the qualities each hero brings to his challenge.
