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Creative Writing

Have you ever read
the creative writing of other authors
and thought...how did they ever come up with that?
If you've read the poetry of Lewis Carroll, you know what I'm talking about.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wade;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Or, how about the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien?

Gríma Wormtongue speaks: "Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness. In bitter watches of the night. When all your life seems to shrink. The walls of your bower closing in about you. A hatch to trammel some wild thing."

Ahhh...words of poetry.

Let's discover how to break away from the ordinary and enter the world of extra-ordinary creative writing!

Take Inventory

Okay...here's a little exercise.
I want you to take inventory of the kinds of books you have been reading.

Before you can be a great writer, you must first be a great reader.

Try reading something out of the ordinary:

Suspense, young adult, fantasy etc.

Study how other creative writing authors construct their sentences. For instance, Brandlyn Collins, known for her "seatbelt suspense," streamlines her novels to such extreme, that only sentences of absolute necessity are left intact.

Have you tried to study other authors but keep getting sucked into the book? Do this, read everything but the dialog. By skipping the dialog, you can study the authors techniques without getting pulled into the story.

Challenge the Assumptions

One of our favorite
creative writing author/teachers, Brandlyn Collins,
says to take what you know or assume about a character or scene and "turn it on it's ear." She suggests writing down everything assumed about a scene and see how you can turn it upside down.

For instance, if I have a character wearing a wedding dress I might assume:

She is getting married
She is happy
This is her wedding day
She wants to get married
She is in love
She is healthy

Now these are some just off the top of the head. What if we challenge some of these assumptions or come up with those deeper ones that are so entrenched into our subconscious, we "never saw it coming."

She is a she
She is human
She is not dying
She is marrying a man

You get the idea. Now see how many more assumptions we DID NOT list.

What if this woman is dying of a rare disease and only has days to live? What is she is wearing the dress because she wants to be buried in it? These questions might take that ordinary story of yours into the extraordinary, wouldn't it. Rest assured that if your reader is reading about a woman sitting in a wedding dress, they are jumping to these same conclusions. Now throw the twist in and "bang! captured audience.

I will set up some links below to help you discover a new way to creative writing. One that will invariably get you back on track to writing with more lilt and certainly a sprinkle of panache!

What a Character!

Writers Block

Point of View

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