Archive for the ‘Creative Writing’ Category
Mind Mapping: My Favorite Prewriting Technique
Have you ever experienced the following?
You suddenly realize that the article you’re supposed to write is due tomorrow, and you haven’t even started it yet. In a panic, you sit down at the computer and begin typing, determined to pull an all-nighter if you have to.
As the hours drag by, your head begins to throb, your stomach contorts into a mass of iron, and rivulets of sweat stream down your back. A voice in your head begins to whisper that the article is dead in the water, but you are determined to complete it, so you remain glued to your computer. You begin agonizing over every word until the few ideas flowing through your brain finally peter out altogether. In fact, it feels like you’ve dead-ended into a sulfurous, murky swamp!
What is wrong with this picture? How did you get into such a predicament?
What could you have done differently that would have led to more positive results?
In The Mind Map Book, creativity expert Tony Buzan writes:
Each bit of information entering your brain—every sensation, memory or thought (incorporating every word, number, code, food, fragrance, line, colour, image, beat, note and texture) can be represented as a central sphere from which radiate tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of hooks.
Each hook represents an association, and each association has its own infinite array of links and connections. The number of associations you have already ‘used’ may be thought of as your memory, your database, your library.
If this is true, it means you embarked on your essay working against your brain, instead of with it! If you had allowed your brain to function optimally, you would have given it the chance to make associations before you started writing.
Example of a Mind Map
Let’s suppose you have learned your lesson. How will you approach your next article differently?
You decide to work with the dreamy, creative part of your brain first by experimenting with some prewriting techniques, such as mind mapping. You might even curl up on your bed with a cup of tea and put on some slow, rhythmical music (adagios from Mozart and Bach work especially well here) to calm your mind and put you in the mood for creating.
To mind map, you take a blank piece of paper and a pen (maybe even some colored pencils) and write down the major topic of your essay in the middle of the paper. Then you draw a circle around it. As your mind starts to make associations (and it will), you write down the next idea that comes to you. You draw a circle around it, too, and connect it to the first word with a straight line.
You continue this process—without judging or criticizing your ideas—as quickly as you can until circles and connecting lines fill the page. Now that you have plenty of material to work with, you allow the logical side of your brain to come to the fore.
You’re amazed at how easy it is to see which of your ideas are the most important, which provide support, and which are weak and irrelevant. In just a few moments, the framework of your argument has become clear: You know where you want to start, you know your most important points, and you know your conclusion. Only after you have completed this process do you move to the computer and begin typing. Once you do, you’re amazed at how easily your ideas flow out. In fact, your article almost writes itself!
Much better than getting bogged down in a murky, sulfurous swamp, isn’t it?
3 Creative Writing Techniques
A friend of mine, Tim Dawdy, is a wonderful Dobro player (and fire chief) in a small town in the state of Washington. He told me on Facebook this morning that he is writing an article about Dobros for a magazine and is struggling to pull it all together. Below are some suggestions I gave him that might help you, too, when it comes to writing your own articles and blogs.
Ask Questions and Listen
Tim mentioned that he had already done a lot of research, so I suggested that he take a look at his notes and ask himself: “What story wants to be told here?” By this I mean that it can sometimes be helpful (as well as a fun creative exercise) to pretend that an object, or a melody, or a pile of research can speak to us.
The trick is to quiet our thoughts down, ask the object what it wants to say, and then listen carefully. As we do, we may discover that some amazing ideas, suggestions and solutions begin to occur to us that we had never thought of before!
Write to a Real Person
I also suggested that Tim choose a real person to “talk” to as he writes. What is this person’s level of knowledge about Dobros and music? Are they experts? Novices? What do they need to know in order to understand and enjoy the article?
For example, I asked Tim to pretend that he is standing in the middle of Artichoke Music, which is an acoustic instrument store, music school and concert venue in Portland, Oregon. As he looks around the store, he sees three people he wants to talk to about his Dobro article. The first person is Richard Colombo, the owner of the store. Richard is a professional musician and recording artist who can play just about any acoustic instrument and has an excellent knowledge of music theory.
The second person is one of Tim’s Dobro students, who is just learning to play the instrument, and the third person is me! I love to sing, but I don’t know anything about theory or stringed instruments, and I only play the piano (badly). The way Tim tells his story to each of us will change considerably due to our different levels of knowledge.
This is just as true in writing, which is why choosing a real person as our audience and “talking” to them when we write is so helpful. Our audience helps us choose the level of detail we provide, the examples we give, and the information we leave out! Tim is also a wonderful storyteller with a hilarious sense of humor. Pretending he is just talking to a friend when he writes can make it easier for him to bring that warmth, feeling and flow into his writing.
Turn Off the Critic and Just Play
My third suggestion to Tim was the most challenging: Sit down and write out your article as quickly as you can—without listening to the critical voice inside your head that is telling you your writing is all wrong…terrible…full of grammar errors…will never work…
The critic can keep us from expressing the fullness of our knowledge, finishing a piece of writing, or ever getting started, so try making a deal with it. Tell it that you appreciate its advice and concerns but that for now you want it to go do something else (like count the daffodils in your garden) while you just play. Then relax, take some deep breaths, and start putting your ideas down on paper.
Once you have finished, invite your critic to come back again and help you revise what you’ve written. Your goal is to turn the words on the page into a story that flows as smoothly as possible from beginning to end. The fun thing about the revision process is that it will often generate additional details and anecdotes that make your story even stronger—so put those in, too.
Once the story feels complete (but not until), work together with your critic to proofread your article for typos and errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling. Then press the publish button and pat yourself on the back for having written a great article!
All Writing Tells a Story
I believe that every kind of writing tells a story—whether it is a blog, a personal statement for a graduate school application, a business letter, a scientific article, or the Great American Novel. Stories from our families, our communities, and the media form our worldview and shape our lives.
Our storytelling faculty appears to be innate; this means that we unconsciously seek a well-told story in everything that we read. When a piece of writing meets our expectations, it can have a powerful effect on us; when it doesn’t, it can leave us confused, irritated, even angry.
Stories Help Us Learn
Scientists have discovered that our natural ability to create stories is intricately connected to our ability to learn. This is because our brains seek to create meaning through relationship, and stories do this superbly.
Because stories form such an important part of who we are, it is important to understand their underlying architecture.
Stories Have an Underlying Structure
At the most basic level, every story has a beginning, a middle and an ending. The beginning draws the audience into the story and makes them want to hear it. The middle tells the basic events in some kind of logical order so that listeners can follow the story easily. Finally, the ending ties up loose ends and brings the story to a satisfying conclusion.
Stories Are Targeted at a Particular Audience
Successful stories are always targeted at a particular audience and use language and terminology the audience understands. This means storytellers never tell just one version; instead, they constantly revise their stories in a creative process that keeps them new and fresh. For example, they may add an extra dollop of humor in order to relax their audience and create a feeling of community; they may change their vocabulary and details when they tell the story to children; or they may change the order of events to add emphasis.
Stories Use Concrete Details
At all times, however, storytellers use concrete details and strong, active verbs to create forward movement and energy. Their language creates pictures in the minds of their listeners, and each word is important in moving the story along. Storytellers are also masters at creating rhythm. This means that their pace is sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Sometimes it stops altogether. This gives the audience the opportunity to absorb what has just been said.
Stories Help Us Feel
Above all, storytellers use emotion to connect deeply to their audience. Skillful storytellers can make us laugh or cry. Their use of emotion helps us identify strongly with the topic, engages us in the message, and unlocks our ability to create and problem solve. Emotions help us remember, they inspire us, and they move us to take action.
What does this mean to you if you just want to write a business article?
It means that you carefully write an introduction that captures your readers’ interest and tantalizes them with the essence of the message to come. It means that your ideas flow logically from one major point to another and that you avoid inserting ideas that are random or out of place. It means that you use concrete details, active verbs and strong nouns and avoid useless fillers and fluff.
And it means that you become adept at listening for rhythm, that you play with your writing until it “sings.” How do you do this? By always being willing to revise what you have written. By changing your vocabulary and the length of your sentences and paragraphs. By playing with different kinds of punctuation, using parallelism, and adding headings and subheadings when appropriate. Finally, you do this by being conscious of white space and giving your readers plenty of chances to stop, breathe, and absorb what you have written.
Most importantly, it means that you find ways to engage your readers’ emotions so that they care about your message.
Want to Improve Your Writing? Revise It! (And Take a Break, Too)
Revision plays a critical role in the writing process.
If you care about quality, however—especially if you are a small business owner and every word you write directly represents you—stop! Don’t press that send button just yet.
I’m sure you’ve heard that writing is a process. This means that putting our thoughts down on paper is only the first step in producing a clear, coherent communication that achieves our goals. The most important step is the next one: Revision.
To be able to revise our work requires that we get some distance from it. This is because we are so close to the piece right after finishing it that we will “see” what we expect to see even if it isn’t actually there!
What’s the solution?
Put the piece down and walk away. Do something else for an hour or two (or—if at all possible—for a day or two). Then come back and carefully re-read what you have written. When you do, you may feel as though someone else had written it altogether.
This distance you have gained plays a critical role in the writing process because faulty reasoning, out-of-place ideas, confusing passages, wordiness, repetitions, and all manner of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors will suddenly leap out at you.
Another plus is that as you begin to work on the issues you have identified, completely new ideas…new support for your points…and better ways to express something will often occur to you as well.
The end result of this revision/taking a break process will be a powerful piece of writing that truly communicates with its intended audience and achieves its goals. At the same time, it will also demonstrate your expertise and your high regard for quality.
Clearly the benefits of taking a break outweigh the urge to just get the thing off your desk, don’t you think?
Thoughts on Memoir, Movies and Storytelling
A potential client contacted me recently. He had written a 70,000-word memoir and was looking for an editor. I asked him to send me the first chapter so I could evaluate the degree of editing that would be required. Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly ready to be edited. In fact, it needed to be completely rewritten.
What was its problem?
It told his story rather than showed it. It presented one fact after another (sometimes in random order and almost always in passive voice) about the place in which he grew up, his father and mother, his siblings, the influence of fundamental religious teachings on the community. It had some interesting details, but it had no emotional impact on me as a reader.
We made a mutual decision not to pursue working with each other. He was not open to writing coaching–only to finding a copyeditor–and I was not willing to go forward as an editor on a project that still needed so much work. But I have been thinking about what I would have told him if he had been open to suggestion.
And that is…think of your memoir as though it were a movie script.
Choose a certain number of scenes for the opening act (i.e., Chapter One) and plot them out ahead of time. What is going to happen in scene one? Who are the characters? Where are they located? What are they doing? What are they saying? What is the main character (the memoir writer) feeling as a result? After writing this out–including snippets of dialogue you want to incorporate–do the same thing for the remaining scenes in the chapter.
Then begin to write.
Such an approach would go a long way toward helping the writer understand how to show rather than tell. It would help him realize that he needs to tell a story that draws his readers in, evokes emotion in them, and connects them deeply to particular characters and events.
I would also suggest to this writer that he check his bookshelves or go to a bookstore and take a look at the first page of several really well written memoirs or biographies. Look how they begin. What does the writer do that draws you in immediately and makes you want to keep reading?
In Three Cups of Tea, for example, David Oliver Relin opens with a scene in the cockpit of a helicopter that is flying over the Hunza Valley in Northwestern Pakistan, which is surrounded by some of the highest mountain peaks in the world. Relin nervously watches a flashing red light indicating that they are almost out of fuel, while the Pakistani Pilot, Brigadier General Bhangoo, nonchalantly taps the fuel guage and explains that it is unreliable. Greg Mortenson is sitting next to the general with a map on his knees that hopefully indicates exactly where they are and how long it will be until they can land.
Relin continues to provide wonderful details that put the reader inside the cockpit. He also presents dialog that reveals the personality of the men in just a few words. And he does this page after page, making it extremely hard for the reader to put the book down!
Clearly, we can learn a great deal from analyzing the way that masters tell their tales, and it would have been a great place for my potential client to start.