The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it—to remember, to keep in mind — as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain—to the end of the story—and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you’re going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.
Tag Archives: writing advice
Have No Unreasonable Fear of Repetition
Have no unreasonable fear of repetition. True, the repetition of a particular word several times in the same paragraph can strike a jarring note, but ordinarily the problem arises differently. The story is told of a feature writer who was doing a piece on the United Fruit Company. He spoke of bananas once; he spoke of bananas twice; he spoke of bananas yet a third time, and now he was desperate. “The world’s leading shippers of the elongated yellow fruit,” he wrote. A fourth banana would have been better. — James J. Kilpatrick
Amy Tan’s Lonely, ‘Pixel-by-Pixel’ Writing Method
Amy Tan, author of THE JOY LUCK CLUB on her writing process:
“As a result, I err on the side of going into too much detail when I do research and write. I abandon 95 percent of it. But I love it. It’s part of my writing process. I never consider it a waste of time. I never know where I’m going when I write. It’s the same reason I never come to conclusions about anything…. We have to turn it in—and at that point, you are guided by craft. You get to do your anarchy, try this and try that, try everything, and then apply craft.”
Read the entire article here.
Sally forth and be TANingly writeful.
– Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
The Arrogance of Presumption
“There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life, you are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now.” ― Natalie Goldberg
On occasion, people stuck in a writing rut seek advice, which has become harder to dispense without sounding like a scribe’s bumper-sticker, especially since you can’t swing Schrödinger’s cat on the interwebz without hitting hundreds of inspirational tips and tidbits.
The simple, honest and truest bit of advice is to write. Write when you’re too tired to write. Write when writing hates your very existence. Write when words have moved out of your head in the wee hours of the night and left no forwarding address. Write when every word you put to paper is like pulling teeth. Write when your inner critic is telling you you’re a talentless shit. Write when the words refuse to make sense. Just write.
But no one wants to hear that because it isn’t a magical solution offered up by a Bagger Vance muse that makes all the tumblers in their befuddled minds line up and open the creative sluice gates.
Which leaves the long way around:
So, things aren’t going your way with your writing and you might be inclined to mope around the house and bask in self-pity for What Might Have Been, but there’s no reason to get down on yourself. Wipe your tears on your sleeves, buck up and realize today marks the start of a whole new ball game. All the old bets are off. You’re back at square one and it’s time to get a new bottom line. Take all your expectation and aspiration and lay them out like cards on a table. This is the first step towards putting the pedal to the metal. You’ve got to make no bones about what you truly wish to accomplish with your writing—–aside from the ludicrous notion of instant riches and fame—–and pull no punches with yourself on the hard work needed to make your dream a reality. And if I can toss in one more tired cliché, your ship doesn’t always come in… sometimes you have to swim out and meet it halfway.
As a writer it’s important to strike a balance between the creative and rational minds. The problem with the creative mind is that it’s equipped with the arrogance of presumption that it knows all there is to know and sometimes it becomes difficult to suspend tyranny long enough to receive messages from life, the universe, the inner muse, and—if you can stretch your fantasy muscles around the strange-but-true notion—your future self. Scoff all you like, but the part of you that exists on a higher plane of consciousness occasionally tries to contact you in order to provide panoramic views of the far horizon. The messages may be brief and strange, or they may appear in a matter-of-fact guise in the midst of your daily routine. Either way, if you turn a blind eye to the minute workings of the world all around you, you may be missing pithy pointers on how to shape your life’s mission to become a happy writer—–note that I didn’t say a successful writer, writing should first and foremost lead to happiness and fulfillment—–in the near and distant future.
A more metaphorical view on encountering obstacles in moving your writing forward is akin to walking in the deep dark forest and encountering a savvy old crone camouflaged as a wolf. Your fear, already swarming because of the unfamiliarity of your surroundings, kicks instantly into high gear, causing you to flee before you can see through the disguise. But now that you know the truth, go back and find the crone again. She has much to teach you about harvesting the treasure that comes from the deep recesses of the creative mind and taking aggressive measures to build up your confidence and mental wellness. Stop talking about and start manifesting the dream, and get as bawdy and funky as you dare.
Those last three paragraphs are a bit cringe-inducing, aren’t they? And they sound like a load of gibberishy nonsense. So, why not take the simple advice and…
Just write.
Sally forth and be writeful.
— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
Writer’s Rut Is A Pain In The Butt
Well, it is if you actually believe in it. I’ve run into more than my fair share of scribes who emphatically state that writer’s block is about as real as Santa, the Easter Bunny, or Steven Spielberg’s dinosaurs. I’m of the opinion that if it’s real to you, then it exists. But whichever side of the fence you personally stand on, there’s no denying the fact that writers, somewhere during the process of penning their magnum opus, can get stuck.
The first telltale sign of blockage is Oculos Computator, better known as The Stare. If you’ve ever experienced it, you know exactly what I mean. Hinder parked in your favorite writing chair, knuckles cracked, fingers nimble and hovering above your keyboard… when you become mesmerized by the siren song—I always hear Bali Hai from South Pacific—of the vast white void of your computer screen.
But you’re a determined writer, so you shake it off, gird your loins, and make resolute your desire to put words to paper. The problem is you can’t. That scene that’s so clear in your mind has suddenly become uncomfortable and difficult to write. Your synopsis refuses to mold itself into story form. An unbridgeable chasm has open up between you and the end of the story. The next scene (or chapter) is an empty pit of nothingness that stares back at you like the abyss and mocks your talent and very existence. Somehow—not through any fault of your own, surely—your characters have all been written into inescapable corners. But you have to write, that ache is in your bones, so what do you wind up doing? You rewrite, edit, rewrite, and edit what’s already been written instead of moving on.
That, my friend, is the kiss of death for creativity.
So, what are the workarounds? Hate to break it to ya, kiddo, but there ain’t no one surefire method. It’s like that line from the Diff’rent Strokes theme, “What might be right for you, may not be right for some.”
What’s that? You think that’s a cop out answer? You want what? Actual advice, even though everybody and their mother uses a different approach? Fine. Here are some of the more popular methods, in a nutshell:
Plot the story out beforehand. It’s akin to knowing the destination before you begin the journey. Stop whinging, you artsy bastard. Sure, preplanned structure can be viewed as limiting the creative spontaneity of your currently unwritten baby, but it’s only a suggested story path that you can alter along the way. Nothing’s written in stone—rewrites’ll drive that point home soon enough, trust me—until your work has been published.
Gender swap. As silly as it might sound, tinkering with the XX and XY chromosomes of your protagonist or antagonist actually helps change the character’s viewpoints and perspective. Or if you’re not up to playing God—who are you kidding? You’re a writer. You think you’re God, go on and admit it—try switching up your writing style. If you normally write in first person, why not give third person a go?
Dora, of Explorer fame, is keen to shout, “Swiper, no swiping!” But you ain’t her and no one’s watching, so why not rip a page from the Star Trek TV series plot device book (from Next Generation to Enterprise) and give your characters a mini goal they must accomplish and pair them up with other characters they absolutely cannot stand. Conflict is story. Just ask Moses. It was written on the back of one of the stone tablets. Trust me on this.
Don’t allow yourself to get hung up on formatting, grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and all that crap, and save editing for the very end. Right now, your goal is to transport that nagging story from the ether of your mind and plunk it firmly down on the page. You’ll have plenty of time to go back and gussy it up later.
And the simplest bit of advice I can offer any of you lazy sods who positively hates following patterns and formulas or doing any sort of precursor to writing; the quick and dirty solution to putting the boots to writer’s block is to stop waiting for your muse—she’s really not that into you and it’s embarrassing how you chase her around like a lovesick puppy—and simply write. Let your thoughts spill out and let it be awful and unstructured and nonsensical, just as long as you’re actively engaging in the process of writing. Hell, start a blog. Works for me.
Now, what are you doing still staring at this? Stop procrastinating. Sally forth and be writeful.
— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
Your Writing Says More About Your Character Than You Realize
Creating worlds? That’s the easy bit. Populating them with three dimensional characters… that’s a bit trickier. Whether you write for a living, a hobby, for sport, or just to have a laugh, you will eventually reach a point in your storytelling where you’re forced to pluck the innocent bystanders from your life and slap them smack dab in the middle of your literary dreamscape. Don’t be embarrassed. It happens to us all.
But just because a fictional character has a fleshy counterpart, imbued with their quirks, verbal crutches and personality tics, it doesn’t always mean they’re actually memorable.
So, how do you combat that? Dig, my friend. You need to burrow underneath the surface layer affectations and unearth the true source of their core character and examine what piqued your interest in the first place.
Even the most boring person you know can be a source of inspiration in your writing if you scratch the surface carefully enough. As corny as it sounds, we all carry within us a wealth of creativity and inspiration. Your job is to look deeper.
One of the most important parts of being a writer, aside from textual flourishes and clever turns of phrase, is the ability to see the world, both the one you’re creating and the one you live in, through their eyes. What are their views on major and minor things? Are they blessed or cursed with odd perceptions of the way the world should and/or actually works? Do they engage in activities that exist outside social norms?
Once you’ve identified these tidbits, you have the first building blocks for your memorable character’s foundation. But it’s only the beginning. You’ll need to build on this in order to make your newly birthed person dynamic.
Since you’re not creating a clone or an exact replica of your best bud or the nosy neighbor down the hall who tracks you via her peephole every time you leave or enter your front door—seriously, lady, get a life—you’ll want to take a few pages from Baron Victor von’s notebook and Frankenstein your creation up a bit.
If you do your job properly, your patchwork person will seem more believable because they contain traits your friends have that you secretly covet—we covet what we see everyday, Clarice—family member habits that absolutely drive you up the wall, as well as the little insecure bits of yourself you pray nobody really notices (FYI: they do, they’re just too polite to bring it up in conversation). Stop moaning, you’ll always be a part of the mix. You can’t help it. You’re the person you know the best. Yup, it’s true and you heard it here first.
The best thing about your ethereal Prometheus is only you will be able to see the stitches that hold the monstrosity together. To everyone else, the jigsaw pieces fit together seamlessly. But you’re still not done.
You can’t have your bouncing baby entity walking around all starkers—well, you can if you’re writing one of those 50 Shades thingies—so you’ll need to dress them with your imagination and layer in true life details like articles of clothing, substantiating them as a new independent life form while better solidifying your understanding of them.
Then, to top things off, dab them with a little Eau de real desires—just behind the ears—and spray obstacles in the air and have them walk through the mist, before you powder them down with motivations.
And voilà! Take a step back and view your bonafide multidimensional, absolutely-fictional-but-seems-so-damn-real-it’s-scary character. Now all you have to do is repeat the process several more times.
Hey, I never said this would be easy.
Sally forth and be writeful.
— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
Top Ten 2013 Mundanities I Didn’t Mind Being Mired In
Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking, “A top ten 2013 list is so… December 2013,” but I didn’t realize I had this great idea until I swiped it from Lani-Lani-bo-Bani-Bonana-fanna-fo-Fani-Fee-fy-mo-Mani, sole proprietor of Life the Universe and Lani.
Why roll out this blog post version of a best of clip show? Is it some clever ruse to get you to follow me til your dying day? To shower me with much deserved (and ever elusive) praise? To send in donations so that I might begin construction on my pet project: The Everlasting Dream Church of Rhyan (my genius must be preserved!)?
Yes, yes, and yes.
So take a gander, and enjoy… or not. Totally your call, mate.
Number 10: The Maconheiro Preview Clips
Clips from a disastrous horror film I attempted to shoot with absolutely no money and with the kind assistance of local talent, until locations became increasingly difficult to obtain and actors booked paying jobs. Still, ya gotta try to find out what’s doable and what ain’t, am I right? Rhetorical question. Of course I’m right.
Number 9: Snatched From the Heart of Stars: What’s Your Creative DNA?
You most likely won’t like this one. No one does but yours truly. It originated from a dream and while I might have bungled it a bit bringing it into reality, I loved the internal exploration. It breaks the blog post rules of being too damned long and meandering, but it’s my baby, and I love it just the way it is. So, deal.
Number 8: My Mad Fat Brain Bug: A Story Box Full of Regret
Writing this actually prompted me to dust off some of my more prehistorically published short speculative fiction stories and repurpose them as a collection (available on Amazon, in case you’re interested)
Number 7: A Message to My Younger Self: Try Harder
An actual message I wrote to my younger self. I’m still working on the Dezil-Washington-Deja-Vu-esque time machine to send it into the past.
Number 6: Passage Through the Graveyard of Earthworms
One of the easiest posts I’ve ever written. Standing in the midst of sun-dried worm cadavers, I typed it up on my iPhone.
Number 5: Rise of the Fallen 722nd
The post pretty much says it all. Rarely am I inspired by a piece of commercial art, but…
Number 4: I Put This Moment Here
Sadly, this post hits closest to home because I am forgetting things at an alarming rate.
Number 3: Braiding Tales: We Built a World, Row by Row
A true story I had forgotten about until an idle comment in some random conversation with absolute strangers triggered the memory. I love when that happens, but I fear how many memories I’ve already forgotten that will never find their triggers.
Number 2: Duchess and the Anecdote
A sort of indirect sequel post to my Number 1 pick, in which I finally managed to utilize a character that’s been stuck in my head for ages.
Number 1: Stories Are the Creatures That Forage in the Wilderness of Our Minds
Although a writing advice post, I really like the wraparound bits in this one and I realize that it’s a bit gauche to fall in love with your own cleverness, but the quote from which the title was extracted is inspired.
And there you have it. My personal best bits of 2013. Let’s see what gems this year brings.
Sally forth and be whipping out your credit card and dialing because operators are standing byingly writeful.
©2014 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
A Tin of Snow
Tins were a wonderful thing to me. They were a depository where the things a boy kept precious could be secreted away and tucked into the backs of closets or under loose floorboards. Mostly the contents of tins included stamps, coins, marbles, smooth and colorful stones and the bits of refuse that could viewed as treasure to the furtive imagination of a young mind.
I collected snow.
Not just any snow, mind you—-I wasn’t some type of frozen vapor hoarding lunatic—-I collected the flakes from the first snow fall and packed little rectangular bricks in the back of the freezer. Why? Because of Frosty the Snowman who came to life after being imbued with the magical properties of first fall snow. But I wasn’t going to build some ratty old snowman, no sir, not me. My goals were slightly loftier than that.
I was going to build a griffin. Agrippa the Griffin.
I’d be the envy of my neighborhood when Agrippa and I went for a walk, and since I read somewhere how griffins have the ability to sense and dig gold up from the earth, I knew we’d be financially sorted for life. And we would totally rule the airways. That went without saying.
Yup. I saw it all clear as day and my plan was foolproof. I traced pictures from books in the New York Public Library so I’d know how to sculpt Agrippa accurately, and knowing he’d be curious about his heritage, I constructed a fascinating family history that would have made any newly birthed mythological creature proud.
As I collected tins of first snow and carefully hid them in the freezer, I knew the world was finally mine and I was destined to live the most incredibly awesome life ever imagined, and nothing could have prevented it…
Until I discovered the hard way that refrigerators came equipped with a thaw feature. All my carefully stacked magically imbued briquettes had been reduced to not-so-magical freezer run-off that dripped impotently into a catch tray.
Needless to say, I have yet to bring Agrippa into existence. And life, well, it hasn’t quite reached that most incredibly awesome high water mark yet.
But where there’s hope…
In the meantime, sally forth and be Merry Griffinmasly writeful.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
The Duh Moment: I Love it When a Story Comes Together
I was toiling away at a short story for the longest time—-it was an elusive bastard of a thing that simply refused to cooperate—-but there I was knee-deep in the rising action stage and the words were flowing at a pretty decent clip and some of it was even good if i do say so myself—-
And then I hit the Duh Moment.
It’s that precise instant when a puzzle piece your subconscious has been working on without your knowledge slips into place and your entire universe makes absolute sense. What’s the matter with me? The solution is so simple! How did I not see this before? It was staring me right in the face, plain as day!
One of the single best experiences when writing. That magical moment of crystal clarity. And it lasts for just a moment.
Just like the episode of Star Trek where the Eymorgs steal Spock’s brain and McCoy has to put on the Teacher in order to perform a reverse brain transplant within the three-hour time limit that the implanted knowledge lasts—-phew! that’s a mouthful—-you’re in a race against time to commit as much of that new-found genius to the page as possible before it slips away like a dream upon waking.
You’re also trying to beat the crash.
Coming down off the adrenaline rush when your story came together, your mind will lock onto something and detour on a tangent and you’ll miss a vital piece of information and the structure will topple like a Jenga tower.
In the end, your mind winds up bone weary and you’ll need to step away from the inspiration carnage in order to rebuild your depleted creativity reserve. No worries, though. It’s all part of the process.
As for the aforementioned short story? Still working on it. The first draft is still in the construction phase, but thanks to a bulletted list as long as your arm, I was able to jot down all the important bits.
Is it just me or does this happen to anyone else?
Sally forth and be Duh Momently writeful.
— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
11 Things Every Writer Needs to Know (More About You and Less About the Writing)
“Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake. Pick one — fame or delight.” ― Ron Dakron
- Writing is a steep, uphill battle but it’s fierce and it’s beautiful and you’ll regret walking away from it before you’ve seen it reach its potential.
- New people, experiences and opportunities to write about won’t stop coming into your life but you need to make space for them. Reexamine all your current relationships, obligations and habits and if you find value in them, hold onto them tighter. If their value escapes you, it’s time to let something go.
- Resolve to be awesome for the rest of your life, starting right now. Just because.
- Writing goals are not reserved for January 1st. Get in the habit of setting them monthly, hell, even weekly. Set them so that you’re moving forward and always trying to progress. Your writing can grow stagnant without them. Beware.
- Confidence is an attractive thing. Readers dig it. Non-readers dig it. We all dig it.
- Negative people chip away at your spirit. Flush the toxins and get yourself into a better writing head space.
- And if you slag off another writer because their abilities fail to impress or interest you, maybe you’re on the road to toxicity. Peer relationships are too valuable to muddy with what you perceive to be the shortcomings of other writers. If you can’t find enjoyment in someone’s writing, don’t read it. Plain and simple.
- You’re human and as such you’re going to waste many hours focusing on who you aren’t, or who you want to secretly be. But you won’t ever wake up and magically become that person. You’ve got to embrace what you bring to the table. If you don’t like what that is, have the courage to change it.
- Regret is a very real thing. It’s going to happen to you at some point. Don’t hold onto things forever but learn from them and let the past go. The past will be a dictator if you let it.
- Yes, when we write we create worlds, but the world doesn’t revolve around us. Turns out we’re just punctuations in a much larger story littered with periods and commas and dashes. How are you helping that story to be better? How are you being the best punctuation you can be?
- Tech advancement is coming at us fast and furious and it’s all too easy to let an emoticon laden text do the talking for you, too easy to click a Like or +1 button instead of engaging people in an actual dialogue. Never lose sight of the beauty of a conversation where you can watch a person’s face express actual emotions. Let a person know that they are worth your words. They are worth your presence. They are worth more than just letters on a screen. Face to face connections are fading faster everyday. Please don’t let the machines win.
Sally forth and be writeful.
— Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
MADD FICTIONAL 