When the new semester comes around and you find your time consumed with writing essays, lab reports, research papers, reading responses and/or everything in between, it’s easy to develop a… contentious relationship with writing. But, while writing is often work we have to do in order to learn from our classes and get good grades, it doesn’t always have to be.
Hi, I’m Lyle. I’ a writing center tutor, I grew up on the Chronicles of Narnia and Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels and I’d like to encourage you to try and write for yourself for a change.
Writing for yourself, or at least writing for something or someone other than your professors, can have a profound impact on both your ability to write and your opinion of writing in general. Writing can be personal, therapeutic and even fun. When I write, I keep a regular journal that helps me process my thoughts and be creative. But I really love reading genre fiction too, and when I’m feeling brave, I like to write some of my own. I wish more people did. It’s a rare treat that a student comes in for an appointment with me to work on a piece of creative writing (though it has happened). That said, creative writing’s not for everyone. Just like not everyone paints or plays the trombone, and not everyone should. The worst thing you could do, though, is give it a shot—you may just end up liking it.
If you’ve never done this sort of writing before, or maybe if the last time you did was in grade school or something, it can be a somewhat daunting prospect. Suddenly without strict guidelines for formatting, content and word count, you may find yourself floundering in trying to figure out how to start. For that reason, what I’ve written here is a collection of five pieces of advice or tips I would love to have given myself if I was just starting out again. Perhaps they’ll give you a better idea how or where to start.
Write to satisfy your tastes.
Everyone has taste. It’s that voice shouting in the back of your head when a character in the movie you’re watching does something you think is stupid, when you would have painted the spaceship a completely different color or when a story’s plot holes are just begging to be pointed out. Turn your frustration into inspiration: try and write it better! I think this is how a lot of writers get started and it’s one of the easiest ways to find something to write about that you can really invest yourself in. A lot of the time, you’ll struggle to, and that can be a useful lesson in understanding how hard writing a good stoy can be. But maybe sometimes, you’ll manage it and you’ll have a story worth sharing.
Focus on your characters.
Depending on the kind of writer you are (or perhaps are primed to become) this may or may not be a problem for you, but I know that I’m the kind of writer that gets really lost in the setting. I can get caught up in building and describing something I feel is really strange or novel, but if you think about any setting in any story you’ve ever liked, all of those settings were occupied by characters, and it’s those characters that made the story, not the setting. Don’t lose sight of your hero amidst the misty forests and towering skyscrapers.
No word is a wasted word.
This is an important lesson for writing in general, but personal creative writing is arguably the best place to learn it. It’s a trap a lot of writers fall into early on. You’ll quickly find that not everything you write will be good. Not everything you write will even be decent, not for a while. But part of the process of writing is just getting those not-so-great words on the page anyways. Understand that everything you put down on the page serves some purpose. Sometimes it gives you an idea that you’ll want to rewrite your entire story around. Other times, you’ll write something you hate or you’re not comfortable with and you’ll know to avoid writing that sort of thing for the time being. But don’t feel the need to fit every sentence you put down into the story. You might end up getting rid of entire pages, but that doesn’t mean that the effort you put into those pages is wasted. First things first, however—get those words on the page. Once they’re there, you can start learning from them, start figuring out how to improve them, but you can’t do that until after you’ve started.
Writing more leads to writing better.
The point before is a bit of a downer but let me try and turn it into an upside for you because, in truth, I think it is one. Your early writing can be as experimental as you like. Have an idea for a fantasy adventure without any of the standard fantasy orcs and elves? Give it a shot. Want to try your hand at a space opera piece that doesn’t involve a galaxy in turmoil? By all means. Interested in an existential horror story that substitutes the occult and otherworldly entities with all-knowing faeries and insidious forest creatures? …uh, go ahead. Maybe you just want to try your hand at a simple fable, a children’s story. That’s fantastic. The best way to get a feel for writing is to “feel” everything—everything that interests you at least. Try it all and don’t commit yourself to any one idea, because when you limit yourself, it’s really easy to get burned out or have a run-in with the infamous writer’s block, and self-imposing limits is an easier trap to fall into than a lot of writers think. And it can be good to self-impose limits, but not without purpose behind it. You’ll know when you’ve got something you really want to commit to, but until then, try it all.
Don’t worry about order.
I think there’s this urge or this unconscious logic that we all follow when we write things, pushing us to try and write from the start of everything, beginning to end. Everything we watch or read is in order, no one reads a research paper and then the abstract, there’s no shuffle button for a Netflix series, so why shouldn’t the same go for what we write? Simply put, I don’t think this is how most people actually think—even though it’s easy to think that it is… Stay with me now. When you’re brainstorming, sometimes you get an awesome idea for how a story should end, then you’ll get another idea for how another story should start and a whole bunch of ideas for cool scenes in the middle of other stories—rarely are any of these ideas in order. Do yourself a favor and ignore the tidy, obsessive part of your brain when you pick up the pen and just write that idea you have, regardless of its place in a larger narrative. You’ll often find that you come up with the other parts in the process of writing or revising what you have, or you’ll have enough pieces already that it’s relatively easy to just fill in the gaps. Not everyone writes like this, but I encourage you to try it. Treat your story like a puzzle, not an obstacle course. Find all of the pieces first, worry about assembling them later.
So, those are my five tips. Inspired? Have any ideas yet? Awesome. Glad to hear it. Get those thoughts on the paper or mash them into your keyboard asap! And once you do, come and seem me in the writing center. I’d love to have a conversation with you about your writing. Still not sure how to start but know that you want to? Come see me anyways—I can help with that too. Either way, let’s talk about writing!
Contributed by: Lyle Davis, Writing Center Tutor
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