The time of resolutions is upon us, and for writers, this usually means re-committing ourselves to projects that have stalled and gathered dust. We sit down at our computers, excited, and then realize that we’re still stuck. We need help. Like kids on swings, we need a push to get started; after that, we can take care of ourselves.
For the past 51 weeks, this blog has shared exercises based on some of the best writing from the most interesting, best-written stories, novels, and essays of the year. Here are twelve of those exercises to give your writing momentum as we enter 2016.
1. Withhold Crucial Plot Information
Sarah Layden is the author of the novel Trip Through Your Wires.
When I was a kid, I devoured Agatha Christie novels, despite knowing that Christie was not showing me everything I needed to solve the mystery. But instead of getting frustrated, my inability to outwit her detective actually made me love the books more. I was in the hands of someone smarter than me, and I knew that not only would all would become clear by the final page, but it would also be shocking.
As writers, we sometimes want to withhold information, but it’s not easy to do. The readers know we’re messing with them and can see the strings being pulled. In Sarah Layden’s, “Bad Enough With Genghis Khan,” she sets up the surprise with lines like this:
Blushing, I delete the history from my browser but forget to delete it from my secret backup location, in case I want to remember the things we’ve deleted. My husband throws something away and thinks it disappears. Images I can never erase.
Find the entire exercise here.
2. Write from Multiple Points of View
Scott Blackwood is the author of the novel See How Small.
The challenge in writing from multiple points of view is to make each POV sound different. In Scott Blackwood’s See How Small, he follows a lot of different characters, and each POV sounds and feels slightly different. However, Blackwood doesn’t accomplish this by trying to mimic the character’s natural voice. Instead, he plays with different storytelling styles. For instance, the novel begins with a chapter that mixes third-person and first-person plural POVs (they and we), but what’s more important is how it focuses on some details and not others:
Another remembered the pride she’d felt the day before, riding a horse no one in her family could ride, a horse that had thrown her older sister. He knows your true heart, her father had said. The horse’s shoulders were lathered with sweat. He had a salty, earthy smell she’d thought of as love.
The men with guns did things to us.
Find the entire exercise here.
3. Make the Most of a High Concept
Dina Guidubaldi is the author of the story collection How Gone We Got.
The term high concept simply means any story whose premise can distilled to a tagline that often serves as a title, as in George Saunders’ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Kelly Link’s The Faery Handbag, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The challenge with high concept stories is make the story as interesting as its title, to advance the conceit in surprising ways. This means that the story may repeat itself or follow a predictable path but that it should have moments of surprise built into that path.
This is exactly what Dina Guidubaldi does in her story “What I Wouldn’t Do.”
I wanted to love you better so I bought a city. It was small but shaped like your fingerprint, with a mansion for you in the middle of the whorl. It was hard to find, your mansion, but since I’d mapped it, troweled cement for the foundation, chopped logs for the beams, hammered and nailed and sanded until my hands fell off, lugged stones in a canvas sling with my teeth when they did, hung tapestries and draped velvet, since I did all of that, I had a pretty good idea where it was. I landscaped your rose garden and made your maze. I scissorhanded some topiaries for you in the shape of hearts and souls and kept up with their maintenance too; I was on a tight schedule and you were my hours and my half-pasts.
Find the entire exercise here.
4. Use Scenes to Show the Passage of Time
Rene S. Perez II is the author of the YA novel Seeing Off the Johns.
Some famous writer once said that stories and novels don’t portray a life but, rather, a glimpse of one part of the life that suggests the entirety of the whole. It’s a true statement that makes you wonder, “Which snapshot is the right one?” or “What part of my life suggests the whole thing? I hope it’s not the part where I forgot to put on deodorant.” It can be an impossible question to answer. A better question might be this: How can a particular scene or moment reveal the constant process of change that is part of any life This is what Rene S. Perez II does in his debut novel, Seeing Off the Johns.
In one scene, the novel uses a dinner as a touchstone for the entire 20-year relationship between two couples. In that history, we learn not just the differences between the couples but how they’ve navigated those differences, and it’s that struggle that reveals the life and makes for interesting drama:
The Mejias had felt a sting of embarrassment when they went to the first of their dinners with the Robisons. They knew the Robisons were well off—Arn was the youngest grandchild and sole remaining Greentonite of Samuel and Wilhelmina Robison, who’d made a small fortune on a ranch outside of town. Arn had inherited money from them. He’d worked hard all his life as a horse doctor and hit big on some investments. But the Mejias weren’t prepared for the kind of food the Robisons were used to.
Find the entire exercise here.
5. Show Things Twice
Nicole Haroutunian is the author of the story collection Speed Dreaming.
When working on plot, we tend to think in terms of major scenes: singular moments of tension and drama when significant character traits are revealed. That’s the idea, anyway. When we actually write these moments, we often discover that we’re burdening them with too much expectation. A scene can only do so much work, and that’s why it’s often a good idea to write a scene into your story twice. It gives you twice as much dramatic space to work within and, thus, the potential to reveal a lot more about a character.
A great example of showing a scene twice can be found in Nicole Haroutunian’s story, “Youse.” It is included in her debut collection, Speed Dreaming. In the story, a man catcalls two young women from his car:
“Next time that dude drives by,” Joanna says, “let’s make sure he knows that one of us is a pro.”
Of course, this means we’re expecting the man to drive by again, and, of course, he does (it’d be a tremendous missed opportunity if he didn’t). That scene begins in the same way:
Then the bronze SUV—the same one, it has to be—is slowing down beside them. They hear a familiar voice. “How about youse…” he starts.
Find the entire exercise here.
6. Write a Fast-Starting First Paragraph
Bess Winter is a Ph.D. student at the fiction program at the University of Cincinnati.
Literary journals receive hundreds, sometimes thousands, of submissions every year. These submissions are read by busy volunteers, making their way through stacks of stories at night and on weekends. As a writer, these are not the ideal conditions for appreciating your carefully crafted manuscript. But this is the world you’re sending your stories into, and so it’s important to consider the audience. What will make your work easier to read? What will catch this busy volunteer’s attention? One answer: a quick-starting opening paragraph. Watch how fast this first paragraph from Bess Winter’s “Are You Running Away?” gets the story moving:
Val says, fuck school. She eats another cracker. Wouldn’t it be great if school were cancelled? And I say, Yeah, it would be great. And she says, I know a way. She scrapes her shoed feet along her parents’ couch. And I say, How? And she says, There are these pipes.
Find the entire exercise here.
7. Create Moments of Intense Emotion
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho is the author of the story collection Barefoot Dogs.
Robert Olen Butler has a theory that stories are written from a white hot center. Your job as a writer is to find it. But what happens when you do? That center often carries significant emotion, and the challenge is how to dramatize that emotion without verging into sentimentality or melodrama. In other words, you need to hit the note at the right pitch and for the right amount of time. A story that hits that moment just right is Antonio Ruiz-Camacho’s story, “Madrid,” from his collection Barefoot Dogs. The moment comes at the end, in a ghostly encounter with the narrator’s father:
He clears his throat, and my stomach cramps for everything looks and feels so real, his voice, his gestures, his presence around me, that always soothed me, regardless.
Find the entire exercise here.
8. Use Forbidden Acts to Create Plot
Monica McFawn is the author of the Flannery O’Connor Award-winning story collection Bright Shards of Someplace Else.
Chekhov famously wrote that if a story puts a gun on the wall in the first act, the gun needs to be fired by the third act. In other words, if a story presents something as dangerous, then it must face that thing directly, not avoid it. Of course, not every story needs a gun. The danger can be located in anything—even things that aren’t necessarily dangerous in every circumstance. All you need is for a character to say, “Don’t do that” or “That’s off-limits” or “Be careful” and you’ve got your dangerous element. A good example of using something forbidden to create plot is Monica McFawn’s story, “Out of the Mouths of Babes.” It’s included in her collection, Bright Shards of Someplace Else, which won the 2014 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
The story is about Grace, a woman who is babysitting Andy Henderson, a precocious nine-year-old boy. By the end of the first page, the story introduces something forbidden, through the instructions of Andy’s mother:
“I said, keep him off the phone. He doesn’t need to be on the phone today.”
By the story’s end, this rule will have been broken multiple times, with increasingly high stakes.
Find the entire exercise here.
9. Structure a Story around a Fairy Tale
Kseniya Melnik is the author of the story collection Snow in May.
Many writers will eventually try to write a story based on a fairy tale or folk tale. There are some powerful examples of such adaptations: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Aimee Bender’s stories, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But writing a modern fairy tale can be easier said than done. How do you capture the essence of the original tale while also creating a story that fulfills our sense of a modern story?
Kseniya Melnik’s story, “The Witch,” achieves that balance beautifully. It was included in her collection Snow in May. The story lays out its fairy tale inspiration in the second paragraph. The narrator is being taken to a witch for help with her headaches and, on the way, thinks about the most famous witch she knows:
I kept picturing the fairy-tale Baba Yaga, who lived deep inside a dark forest in a cabin held up by chicken legs. Her home was surrounded by a fence of bones, on top of which human skulls with glowing eye sockets sat like ghastly lanterns. Baba Yaga flew in a giant iron mortar, driving it with a pestle and sweeping her trail with a broomstick, on the hunt for children to cook in her oven for dinner.
Find the entire exercise here.
10. Write Dialogue that Creates Conflict
Laila Lalami is the author of the novel The Moor’s Account.
In real life, we strive for understanding, but in stories, conflict often works best when characters speak as if they don’t hear one another. A great example of dialogue without understanding can be found in Laila Lalami’s novel The Moor’s Account. The novel re-imagines the expedition of Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish explorer who shipwrecked in Galveston and traveled across Texas, the American Southwest, and Mexico. Lalami tells this story from the perspective of a Moroccan slave who was one of four people to survive the journey
Early in the novel, de Vaca’s expedition claims the land of La Florida for Spain. The expedition is alone on a beach, in the middle of an empty indigenous village. In other words, the only people present are the conquistadors, and yet the notary unrolls a scroll and reads a long declaration claiming the land. The narrator listens and thinks this:
Until Señor Albaniz had arrived at the promises and threats, I had not known that this speech was meant for the Indians. Nor could I understand why it was given here, on this beach, if its intended recipients had already fled their village. How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians—just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.
Find the entire exercise here.
11. Use an Omniscient Narrator
Ru Freeman is the author of the novel On Sal Mal Lane and the editor of the anthology Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine.
One of the most tempting points of view for a novel is the omniscient, godlike POV. It’s also, perhaps, the most difficult to pull off. The literary critic James Wood has called it almost impossible. Yet, it’s also the case that certain stories require a narrator who exists on a different plane than the characters, who can focus on a few of them for a while but can also speak authoritatively about very large groups of them (entire countries, even). A novel that both requires and uses an omniscient POV is Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane.
This omniscient voices takes different forms, sometimes becoming embodied in a kind of we:
God was not responsible for what came to pass. People said it was karma, punishment in this life for past sins, fate. People said that no beauty was permitted in the world without some accompanying darkness to balance it out, and, surely, these children were beautiful. But what people said was unimportant; what befell them befell us all.
Find the entire exercise here.
12. Defamiliarize the Familiar
Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the forthcoming story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone.
Any discussion of writing horror, sci-fi, or fantasy fiction will inevitably arrive at the phrase “defamiliarize the familiar.” In short, stories aim to make readers pay attention to something they’d normally not give a second glance. For example, the film The Shining transformed a kid on a tricycle into the stuff of nightmares. All writing can do this, not just genre fiction. A creepy example of a straight realism that does this is Sequoia Nagamatsu’s story, “Placentophagy.” By the end of its first line, the familiar has been totally upended:
My doctor always asked how I would prepare it, the placenta.
Find the entire exercise here.
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