With summer on the horizon, it's time to complete the last of our spring cleaning with some writing exercises and plans for the future.
What a week! I apologize for this post being a day late, but I've had quite a week and decided to devote Saturday to myself (blogging, unfortunately, is not included on the list of "treats" in the Treat Yo Self handbook). I celebrated a wonderful birthday Thursday, finally got a beautiful guitar, and studied relentlessly for my AP Euro exam, which I took Friday in a stifling auxiliary gym that reeked of orange peels and sawdust.
Taking this exam closed a chapter that I don't remember beginning. I felt restless yesterday and was moved to shovel all of my old clothes out of my drawers and closet, and rearrange my bedroom with my windows propped open. This was a belated spring cleaning on my part that I had delayed out of stress and anxiety; once I got around to doing it though, I felt renewed and rejuvenated. So, I decided to pattern our weekly writing foray around that theme: spring cleaning. New beginnings. And this time, there won't be a stupid DBQ involved.
It's incredibly easy to feel burdened by writing projects. With loose ends scattered all over the place, it might seem impossible to ever tie them all up without overextending yourself into oblivion. Your prose feels cluttered, dusty, stagnant; your motivation withers with every passing sentence. I myself was feeling the brunt of this during the previous week: a project I had estimated to finish last night is only three-fourths of the way done (sans edits, which might take another night). That's where the trite old platitude of spring cleaning comes in to clear the cobwebs of your mind and part those metaphorical curtains. Don't be afraid to let the sunshine in (although you might want to keep the pollen out).
I'm being serious. Is a project not going anywhere? Toss it out. Rewrite. Don't be afraid to try again. A bad first draft is not a bad final draft. You have the power to sculpt your writing destiny and with great power comes great responsibility, as Uncle Ben is purported to have told Peter. You will never get anywhere if you keep opening the same Word document or notebook and merely staring at your unfinished work in defeat. It may sound bad now, but if there's still potential just waiting to be tapped, you owe it to yourself to go all the way.
We also want to try new things. I know the prospect of "new" might scare a handful of you Luddites and agoraphobics, but if it weren't for "new", we'd still be trapped in the monotonous rut of scholarly text that was never allowed to manifest into the first novel, then scholasticism, then humanism, and then into the dizzying plethora of "isms" that still populate the literary world. "New" is also a little intimidating to the writer who has carved themselves a niche in a particular genre or style and is frightened by the prospect of leaving their comfort zone.
Don't! Never be afraid of leaving your comfort zone! That's not to say I want you to go stand on a rooftop in spite of your paralyzing fear of heights, but in terms of creativity, the comfort zone is only a temporary establishment. It's where you plant your roots as a beginner, where you ascertain which skills and methods are easiest or most comfortable for you when you engage in your craft. While this is a great place to begin, it is by no means where you should be two years after writing. You need to keep pushing yourself to explore the vast, unending world of storytelling and style and genre.
For example: I hate fantasy. I have always hated fantasy. With the rare exception of the Harry Potter series, I cannot list even one fantasy book I have ever enjoyed--not even King's The Eye of the Dragon could pique my interest. If you ask me to write fantasy, I'll either laugh hysterically or moan quietly until you change your mind. Fantasy and I have a long, embittered past.
But! I've written it before. Not because I enjoy it, but because I had to flex that creative muscle. Fantasy may seem like the amateur's genre, but it actually requires a great deal of tact and ingenuity that most writers and readers grossly underestimate. I mean: we know what a tree is. A horror writer or a romance writer or a slice of life writer does not need to teach you about a tree and its purpose in the story. Fantasy writers, however, have to devise names and create new creatures to service the genre and engage the reader, as well as invent whole sprawling universes. Even though I hated every second of it, I still did it and I learned a great deal about thinking quickly on my feet (or fingers) in terms of creating mythology for a world that exists nowhere else but in my mind.
Genre isn't the only element to experiment with. Tweaking your prose into something unlike what you typically write is actually a great exercise. It forces you out of that dreaded comfort zone and into a place where you have to write more consciously. As you can probably deduct from these posts, I tend towards a longer sentence structure and utilize a broader vocabulary than what I should. I work very hard with style and form, and experiment with it often. In fact, here's two sentences from two different pieces of work, written in different styles.
He hears her scream—a searing staccato of sound that punches through him like an earthbound icicle—before the heavy paws slam against his back. He's pinned against the ground so quickly that his nose rebounds on a fallow patch of decayed strawberry plants and the last thing he remembers before the night swallows him up entirely is the sickly-sweet aroma of strawberries and the dazzling green headlights of Ash's eyes.
When we stood up, it must have needled something for him. Because when I extended my hand for a shake, he batted it away and hugged me and it was actually a relief until his hand started scrabbling for my breast. I wasn't wearing a bra because I had forgotten where I kept them, so I shoved his hand away and said thank you for these years of work.
He said I'll keep cheering for the home team. There was a tent in his khakis. I didn't know what that phrase meant. Maybe it was a Northern thing. People from Maine have a weird euphemism for every goddamn thing in the world.
These two excerpts are different in every respect. Passage One is told in limited third person and is told in present-tense (something I only do for writing exercises, as it is a gamble to write with outside of blog entries and the shortest of short stories); Passage Two is told in first person and is told in past-tense. The first passage is much more descriptive in terms of sights and sounds and smells, while the other is more a stream-of-consciousness style that prioritizes feelings and arbitrary pieces of "trivia" over concrete descriptions. One might think these two excerpts were written by different authors, but they were just the work of someone who sometimes gets bored of her own style and wants to walk on the present-tense wild side.
Let's be honest, though. You'll eventually return to your safe zone. You'll write the genre you feel most comfortable with in the style you like the best. I can't keep you from retreating back there, but at least go back with more knowledge about your writing capacities and abilities than ever before. You're allowed to experiment and write crazy, often unpublishable, things. I would probably never publish something written in a style like Passage Two because it lacks a solid foundation and descriptive tangents, which are both things I include in the first passage. But experimenting with it teaches me that I am capable of writing it and I can make it sound entertaining and fresh ("People from Maine have a weird euphemism for every goddamn thing in the world" is a personal observation of mine that I loved putting into words).
With spring's mild nights receding and summer charging heedlessly the western hemisphere, we are charged with a spirit of newness and potential. We have the potential to be great. We have the potential to be famous. We have the potential to write something beautiful and interesting and exciting and organic and innovative. I don't know about you guys, but I think that's well worth venturing out of comfort zone for.
Until next week, find an old piece of work and rewrite it in a completely different style. Throw in second-person narrative. Stop using commas. Make every character sound like Mafia members at a poker game/business meeting. Write until it sounds like a different person altogether.
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