If you could change anything in the world, it would be . . .
Or . . .
The time I felt most changed in a single second was when . . .
Use one or both writing prompts. Just write!
Prompts are inspired from Write Free – attracting the creative life, revised second edition by Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld.
When you read the next ditty, read “d-o-e-s” as in female deer.
Mairzy Doats
Mares eat oats and does eat oats
and little lambs eat ivy
a kid will eat ivy, too
wouldn’t you?
Say it fast and it becomes:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
Link to what this sounds like.
I think of this rhyme when I think of pacing – paying attention to the cadence and rhythm of writing.
How and when to increase the pace when writing.
Paraphrased from Make A Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld:
By pacing your scenes well and choosing the proper length for each scene, you can control the kinds of emotional effects your scenes have, leaving the reader with the feeling of having taken a satisfying journey.
Pace should match the emotional content of your scene. First scenes should get going with an emotional bang—start big or dramatic, ratchet up the suspense or lay in the fear, since you’re capturing the reader here.
Your first scene is like a cold pool—the reader needs to dive in and get moving fast, or he’ll be too cold to stay in the water for very long. In other scene types, you’ll have more leeway with pacing. In the first scene, however, a quick pace—with more action and less reflection or exposition—will be a better sell.
Dramatic scenes – Start slow, speed up pace to match emotional intensity, slow down for reflection.
Speed up pace: Strip away exposition, use dialogue, quick action, and hot emotional content to build intensity.
When and how to slow the pace
After a lot of action or intense dialogue give the reader time to digest what happened.
Use description, narration, details and interior monologues to slow the pace.
When a character is contemplative, time slows down.
During these contemplative scenes you can weave in details. Be specific and descriptive. Give your character something to observe or something to do, more than hair twirling.
Your turn: Do a freewrite about pacing.
Here’s mine, thinking about Mairzy Doats. This was a quickly written spontaneous type of writing, just for fun.
Go too fast and we get frantic and hear garble versus calm, steady breaths and an even, gentle flow.
Calm is water caressing rocks, dark green moss going with the flow.
No rough and tumble white water rapids. No gurgling over brooks, no water cascading over boulders.
Rather, when we slow our writing, we achieve a calm, quiet, graceful feeling.
Pace yourself. Eat watermelon slowly. Savor the juices.
Pace yourself.
Write fast let you lose that thought.
To slow down, think about the poppy scene in Wizard of Oz. Slower, slower, snail’s pace slow.
Meditate. Ommmmmmm.
To pick up the pace, think caffeine and the energy of a toddler/child, always on the go. Child knows no pacing. Always running, talking, doing.
Challenge self: No such thing as Writer’s Block. Just keep writing.
More on pacing: Find the right pace by Adair Lara: Prompt #70
It’s early Monday morning. The day is just getting started and it’s very quiet. The softly falling rain has hushed all ambient noises. No cars drive up our country lane. People are still sleeping on this soft-feeling day, not quite ready to begin the busyness of our lives. Even the birds are quiet this morning.
And I’m wondering, do you want to write? Do you contemplate ideas to write about as you stay in bed just a little longer in the morning? Do you have brilliant, awesome thoughts for writing while you are driving? As you wait for sleep to settle in, do these brilliant ideas swirl in your head? And they are brilliant, I am sure.
You tell yourself you will remember everything until you have time to write. Finally, you sit down to write and those creative ideas seem to have vanished. You stretch to grasp your dazzling insights, but now they are elusive.
If only you had made a note to jog your memory.
What to do?
Keep a notebook and pen handy.
Jordan Rosenfeld suggests keeping a notebook and pen in every room. Rayne Wolfe suggests keeping a notebook in your back pocket. Why not? Oh, you don’t wear jeans with back pockets? How about a shirt pocket? Or a pocketbook (isn’t that a funny word for purse?). Keep a notebook or recording device your car. Use only when it’s safe, of course.
You can also use technology to track of your ideas: Tablets, a Notebook (the computer kind), recording devices, Evernote, your smartphone, digital slates. Probably before I can tap the “publish” button for this post, there will be more gadgets available.
So next time, you sit down to write, dig out your note-leaving device and pick up where you left off. That is, if you can read your writing. Sorry, I can’t help you with that. I can barely decipher my scribblings. Just write!
Guest Blogger Jordan Rosenfeld: 5 Habits of Persistent Writers (That you can adopt, too).
Show me two equally capable writers and I’ll show one who succeeds at her publishing dreams and one who struggles. What’s the difference between them? And no, the answer isn’t luck, or “being born with it.” The writer who succeeds persists. What does this mean, precisely? We hear a lot about persistence–is it just a numbers game, where if you keep submitting the same story or novel eventually it will just magically land? No, that’s blind hope. Persistence is passion + commitment + practice. Below I’ll walk you through seven strategies for becoming a persistent writer, and I promise you the answer will not include self-immolation or losing sleep.
Find a Passion Root: One of the most amazing things about rose bushes is that they are notoriously difficult to kill by chopping or cutting. You can prune it down to a tiny little nubbin, and next season you’ll simply have a fuller, more glorious rose bush. You have to cut out its root, its heart, to kill such a persistent, gorgeous flower. We writers can take a lesson from the rose, even if it’s not your flower—if you can identify those qualities and reasons that make you passionate about your writing—whether you do it for work or pleasure—you will forge a root that is incredibly difficult to kill inside you despite the many vagaries of the field, from rejection to comments from trolls. You do this by identifying why you write, what it means to you, and how you can use it to serve yourself and others.
Set Boundaries: It took me nearly a decade to stop allowing interruptions to my writing time—answering the phone to friends in need, getting up to answer my husband’s shouted-across-the-house questions, or making overlapping commitments that would cut into my writing time. I don’t cancel on my clients, I don’t show up late to appointments, so why would I not treat my own writing time with the same respect? The more you build strong boundaries around your writing time, the more you train yourself and others to treat it with respect (and you’re more likely to get it done). But in order to do this you first have to do the next step:
Treat Creative Time as Work Time: When you sit down to write, especially when it’s NOT for work (but even if it is), you have the right to let your friends, family and pets know that you are no longer interruptible. Shut doors, put up “writer at work” signs, do whatever you can to approach your own writing with serious intent and others will follow suit. Not to mention, the only way to find inspiration is to show up and make time for it. Inspiration rarely comes in lightning bolts, but often comes when you prime the pump and let a little imperfect writing flow first.
Don’t be an Island: The mistake many of us make in this already isolated craft, is to do everything in isolation, perhaps to even take pride in this state of being. But you need the support of other writers who get what you go through, and their eyes on your work to see past your blind spots. I firmly believe in trusted allies you can kvetch to, seek cheerleading from, and rely upon for helpful but critical feedback.
Revise: Many of us writers are addicted to the fresh outpouring of a new draft—that’s the stage at which it feels like release, flowing out of us at last onto the page. And as much as we’d all like to produce finished work on the first try, there’s beauty in the revision process, which David Michael Kaplan calls “re-seeing.” Though you may feel a stab of fear at the idea of having to cut and pare, snip and trim, take comfort in the knowledge that even the NYT bestsellers have editors, and rarely is a piece of writing ever published that hasn’t been revised.
Jordan Rosenfeld is the author of A Writer’s Guide to Persistence, Make a Scene, Write Free (with Rebecca Lawton), the novels Forged in Grace and Night Oracle and the forthcoming novel Women in Red, and Writing Deep Scenes (with Martha Alderson). Her work has appeared in: AlterNet, Brain Child, Bustle, DAME, GOOD, Mental Floss, Modern Loss, New York Times, The Nervous Breakdown, Ozy, Role/Reboot, Rewire Me, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, STIR Journal, Sweatpants & Coffee, Washington Post, and The Weeklings.
Bella Andre, David Corbett and Jordan Rosenfeld have all been Writers Forum of Petaluma presenters. Scroll down for details.
The September 2014 issue of Writer’s Digest magazine is filled with practical, helpful and inspirational articles. Bella Andre is on the cover. Her story, “Romancing Big Publishers With E-book Success” might encourage you to go the indie route for publishing or try traditional. She also talks about why she uses a pen name.
Do you wonder about “pacing and tension?” Jessica Page Morrell has written an article that explains it in easy-to-understand format.
Donald Maass writes about “Building Microtension Into Every Scene” and makes it seem like an easy thing to do.
Writer’s Digest Contest #60 is one you can enter. “Write a short story of 750 words or fewer based on the prompt: A man opens his mailbox to find an envelope containing a set of instructions.” “You can be funny, poignant, witty, etc.; It is, after all, your story.”
To enter: Send your story using the online form at writersdigest.com/your-story-competition or via email to yourstorycontest@fmedia.com (entries must be pasted directly into the body of the email; attachments will not be opened).
Note from Marlene: I don’t receive any money from endorsing Writer’s Digest Magazine. I just enjoy articles that are well-written, informative and inspiring for writers and this particular issue is jam-packed with good stuff.
Bella Andre has been a Writers Forum presenter twice. Other contributors in this issue who have also been Writers Forum presenters: Jordan Rosenfeld (twice), and David Corbett. Lots of talent in these pages, as well as at Writers Forum.
And be sure to check out the last page of Writer’s Digest, “Reject A Hit.” Amy Maricinick, a Petaluma’s Jumpstart Sonoma county writers cleverly spoofed a rejection letter for Great Expectations in the March/April 2013. Your name can be here, too. Write your Reject a Hit spoof.
In an interview with The Costco Connection, Will Forte – an eight-year vet of Saturday Night Live – talks about his experience working with Bruce Dern in the movie “Nebraska.” When asked what he learned from Bruce Dern, Will answered, “Bruce would always give me this advice: ‘Be in the moment. Just find the truth of the scene.’ I’m not a trained actor, so that just seemed like drama school hogwash, but the further we got into the movie, it really made a lot of sense to me, and then I started thinking, maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do in comedy too. The truths might be very different, the levels of reality might be different, but you have to commit 100 percent either way.”
Note from Marlene: I think this is true with writing also. When “the truth of the scene” is conveyed, writing is strong and readers feel a visceral reaction.
Excellent resource book for writing good scenes: Make A Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld.
