Monthly Archives: March 2016

Daily Writing Tip 16 of 100, Beware Of Stale Ideas

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Beware Of Stale Ideas

Source – Building Fiction by Jesse Lee Kercheval

As you gather the materials of writing, be careful about drawing on television and movies. When you rely too heavily on mass media, whose messages are available to almost everybody on the planet, it may be hard to write a story that will strike readers as fresh or original or worht their time. It’s the difference between fresh and stale air.

In the writing classes I have taken, it is surprising how often, when discussing plot and character, we would discuss films rather than literature. It’s simply where the shared experience lies. Everyone has seen Star Wars – but only a rare few have read Mill on the Floss.

So much the shame.

I’ve found that when I’m trying to get some writing done, the absolute worst thing is to turn on the TV. If I do that, no matter what I watch, I’m not going to be creating anything for a long time. When I was young, we called it the idiot tube. Well, at least the tube part is gone.

Bicycle Drag Race

Posted on by Bill Chance

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
—-H.G. Wells

Taken yesterday at the AOT Just Ride Dallas Drag Race on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.

Bicycle Drag Racer on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge

Bicycle Drag Racer on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge

Daily Writing Tip 15 of 100, Write A Values Listing

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Write A Values Listing

Source – The Passionate, Accurate Story by Carol Bly

I prefer listing one”s values to listing just words because values are by definition emotional: they are how we feel about the given subject. It helps our always-mangy memory, in any case to list the qualities of people or of life which we hold dear or which we deplore. A values listing keeps us conscious of large virtues when we can so easily get lost in small virtues.

Values Listing: Examples

1. Two goals or values which make life good or bearable or would if they were in operation.
2. Two goals or values which cause injustice and suffering or lessening of joy.
3. Two missing goals or behaviors.
4. Two injustices which you see about you and should keep on eye on, even on your wedding day.

I was introduced to Carol Bly and her book, The Passionate, Accurate Story years ago in a fiction writing class taught by David Haynes. He introduced the idea of making a values listing – and I’ll have to admit, at first I didn’t understand how important it was. It took a while and some practice to get it to sink in. You can get so wound around the spindle of plot, character, setting and the other mechanical elements of telling a story it is easy to forget why you are going to all this work.

We all have read wonderfully written literature that feels hollow. They are all skill and no heart.

A value listing is a start at regaining the memory of why you wanted to do this in the first place. Fiction is a big lie that is the only way to tell a bigger truth.

I consider Carol Bly’s book to be an irreplaceable guidebook to finding that bigger truth.

Daily Writing Tip 14 of 100, How To Make Your Fiction Have An Ultimate Meaning

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – How To Make Your Fiction Have An Ultimate Meaning

Source – Technique In Fiction by Robie Macauley and George Lanning

Now you have arrived at the point where your sketchy map leaves off. Your guides, your equipment bearers, the other members of the climbing party have all stopped at various shelter points along the way. The peak of the mountain rises up in front of you. You are all alone. Your only comfort is the recollection that nobody ever reached the summit unless he went by himself.

This is the final paragraph of a long and very dense, technical book about writing. It’s filled with references to great writers and how they did what they did. There are extensive chapters on characterization, plot, setting, point of view… and all the other points and pitfalls of putting those exquisite lies onto a page.

And there it is at the end. After all that knowledge and teaching you are left starting at that mountain of a blank page all by yourself.

Daily Writing Tip 13 of 100, Use Dialogue As A Trigger For Stories

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Use Dialogue As A Trigger For Stories

Source – Writing Dialogue by Tom Chiarella

Learn this quirk. Put it in your bag of tricks. Use dialogue as a trigger for stories.

I go back to my old advice first. Listen. Don’t Talk. Listen. If you’ve trained yourself as a conscious listener, almost any line of overheard dialogue can make a starting point.

This reminds me of a time many years ago. My son would take two hours of art lessons every Saturday morning. I’d drop him off and then head to a nearby Starbucks to kill the time.

I’ve never looked at Starbucks as a coffee place – I view it as an office rental firm. For the overprice of a beverage, you get somewhere to sit. Probably the most important thing I learned in the years of spending every Saturday morning in that Starbucks was how to sip a Venti in a way to make it last two hours.

It was a crowded spot at that time of day – but also crowded in a certain sort of way. People weren’t in there alone with their laptops (except for me). They were there in pairs or groups and they all seemed to have some sort of business to attend to. And on a weekend morning, that business was of an emotional nature.

I became very good at sitting there, taking in all the sounds around me, and sorting out a single thread of conversation. It was always interesting and often more than a tad salacious. For some reason that Starbucks seemed to be a popular place for people to come and confess the sins they committed on Friday night.

To this day, I miss those hours spent listening and writing. I haven’t found any other place with dialogue as interesting as that… just floating around in the air.

Daily Writing Tip 12 of 100, Making Piles

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Making Piles

Source – The Writing Book by Kate Grenville

The first step in shaping a story is to sort through your collection of raw material. Have a look at all the pieces you have and see if you can sort them into different piles — categories of one kind or another.

What you’re looking for are elements that go together or connect in some way. They don’t have to connect in any logical way; the connection can be nothing more than an intuition that a couple of things are related. At this stage, your material doesn’t have to add up to anything, or be a story.

I have been a fan of Kate Grenville for a long time. I read the two connected novels Lilian’s Story and Albion’s Story and was tremendously impressed at her writing and insight. She’s also written a number of writing books and find her advice always good.

In today’s snip, she talks about writing from piles – instinctive groupings of stuff you have collected.

Maybe it is the hoarder in me, but I’ve always wanted to write like that – and always tried to collect little bits of inspiration (names, characters, situations, ideas, aphorisms, bits of dialog, places, conflicts, disasters) but have never had much luck with using them later in fiction works. The bits – that seemed like little shiny jewels when I collected them – seem to quickly lose their luster and fall to dust. I look at them and say to myself, “What the hell was I thinking when I wasted precious ink in writing this down.”

But here we have a master storyteller mining gold from this gray straw. I need to give it another try. I need to read what she says and take it to heart. She knows what she’s talking about and I, obviously, don’t.

So notepad on one side, highlighter on the other… in I dive.

Daily Writing Tip 11 of 100, Creating A Ritual

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Creating A Ritual

Source – Spark – by Julie Burstein

The writer Isabel Allende has a very clear ritual.When she visited Studio 360 to talk about her novel Ines of My Soul, she said every year, on January 8, she sits down at her desk to write a new book.

Even if she hasn’t finished the book from the previous year, she puts all her research material aside and starts a new book on the morning of January 8. Even if she has no idea what she is going to write about she starts a new book on January 8.

Imagine the pressure on the evening of January 7.

This is a big, confusing, terrifying world… and we can only see a tiny, tiny sliver of it – both in place and in time. Writing is an attempt to make sense of it all – which is an absurd and insurmountable goal. The only way we can deal with the terrible mystery of that vast unknowable existence out there is with faith. And one key to maintaining faith in the face of terror is ritual. Even for the most devout faithless out there – without ritual it is impossible to even get out of bed in the morning.

If nothing else, ritual helps get the work done. And there is nothing more important than that.

Daily Writing Tip 10 of 100, Keep It Specific

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Keep It Specific

Source – A Manual Of Writer’s Tricks, by David L. Carroll

Don’t say dog. Say cocker spaniel. Don’t say house. Say cottage. Or vicarage. Or split-level. Or shack. Avoid general statements filled with lackluster parts of speech.

Life is too short to live in something as generic as a house. It’s a lot more fun to live in a moss-covered stone cottage or a 50’s era split-level, full of ghosts of cigarettes and big hair – or in a shotgun shack. Yes, life is too short.