Writing Wednesday

Weeks go by pretty damn quickly, and I find myself grasping for straws on what to post for each week’s Writing Wednesday.  Keeping things fresh can be difficult, and that goes for prose, poetry, non fiction, and blogging all alike.

 

One of the best ways to stay fresh, however, is to keep practicing.  This is actually somewhat of an extension of my post about writing for yourself versus writing for others, but what I’m discussing here is the idea of the writing exercise.  You’re not doing it to add to your novel, or to your anthology, or your biography, or whatever project you’ve got going because presumably, if you’re in the boat I’m in right in this moment, you’re having trouble keeping it snappy, keeping it interesting, keeping it Zest-fully clean.

 

Any of you that have had any formal education in writing (taking a class to fill out some credits in college counts) are probably familiar with what I mean.  Most teachers will assign a series of short assignments in the beginning of a semester, assignments that are essentially little writing prompts, but with limitations.  Write about a gun without using the words gun, firearm, or even WEAPON.  Oh, and you’ve got 500 words.  Write about your favorite food, or smell, or song, but from the perspective of someone who hates it.

 

These sort of exercises are important because they force you to think outside of your own head.  You have to not just step out of the box, but step out of yourself, out of a world where you can just say ‘gun’ and everyone knows what the fuck you’re talking about, out of your own world where you don’t understand how someone could hate pizza without being a filthy communist pig.  You need to consider a thing, or a concept, for what it is as a whole.  You need to consider how it works, what it’s made of, where it comes from.  You have to come at it from every angle, and then a lot of the time compress that down to fit within a certain word limit.  You’re not only testing how well you can analyze something, you’re testing how well you can summarize that analysis to it’s very essentials.  It’s about being broad and succinct all in the same exercise and sometimes these things can be fucking brutal.

 

Other exercises include prompts to write a story that includes a really obscure word, like ‘abaft’ or ‘doppio’, somewhere in the text.  Sometimes that word needs to be important to the story, sometimes not.  Either way, finding a place to put that word can be difficult without feeling like it’s been shoehorned in.  Sometimes that one word will change the entire setting or who the characters are.  Sometimes it will determine the presence of a side character or a piece of dialogue.

 

The point of these exercises is the same as any other exercise.  You need to keep your craft well-trained in order to use it properly.  If you’re having trouble lifting something, you spend a little more time on the bench press until you no longer have a problem.  If you can’t figure out the best way to phrase a sentence, there’s no shame in spending a little time on the side working out your craft.

 

One thing I used to do (and should probably start doing again) is exercise my writing in text messages.  I would send one friend or another as complete a story or description of an object (without using any words related to that object) as I could in a single text message.  It was a fun challenge, and my friends’ reactions were usually pretty funny.  A few of these, and I was usually ready to tackle my REAL project, with a renewed vigor and thirst for getting it done.  Give it a try sometime.