"I never told anyone..." & other Found First Lines

Start a story or stories with the following lines: “I never told anyone…” “I did tell one person. God help me. She/he …” “I never told anyone, but I’ll tell you…” This writing exercise is from Dorothy Allison, collected in Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, edited by Bret Anthony Johnson. Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer The book is a collection of writing exercises taken from writers including Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Robbins, Elizabeth Strout and Ann Packer, among others. Include are exercises on Getting Started, Character, Point of View and Tone, Plot and Narrative, Dialogue and Voice, Descriptive Language, Revision & Daily Warm-ups. It's a great book if you’re searching for writing exercises to get you started.

The Sounds of Words: "Bulbous Bouffant."

A lot of writers think about the meaning of the words in a sentence, but not the sounds of the words and the way the sounds of words together form a kind of music. Here's a great video on the sound of words by the Vestibules, sent courtesy of Jacob Madden.

A Poem A Day

Try reading a poem before your write ,and preferably out loud. This suggestion comes from Ray Bradbury’s wonderful book, Zen in the Art of Writing in his chapter entitled “How to Keep and Feed a Muse.” He writes: “Read poetry everyday of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition… It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your had. And above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books…What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms" ( 36-37). Consider creating a collection of your favorite poems in a file, or better yet, printing them and making a book for reference when you need ideas and inspiration. A great online source for poetry: The Poetry Foundation.

White Space Isn't Just For Designers

Here is the entire second chapter of Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum:

Madeleine Dreams

A GROTESQUELY FAT WOMAN lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.

There are many things to learn and appreciate about Shun-Lien Bynum’s style and wonderful writing. But one thing writers can learn from is how she makes use of white space. She doesn’t fill up the entire page with words. Many of her chapters consist of a few paragraphs. Some are as short as two or three lines. The longest chapters are two or three few pages in length. What does white space do?

White space, like a frame, focuses the readers' attention. 

If you only have one paragraph to tell an entire story, every word and image in that paragraph becomes even more significant. Use of white space distills and concentrates the power of the words used. Shun-Lien Bynum’s description for example, of gathering up fat “just as another woman gathers up her skirts” is so vivid, I remember the image years after reading the book. Consider too, some of her chapter titles: beatific, blush, burn, performance, evasion. Substitute, inept, petted, unveiled, imposter. She chooses titles, which are evocative and work with white space because they call attention to the word and its many meanings.

White Space, like silence allows the reader to absorb what’s being said. 

 Without silence, you cannot hear music. Given the pace of life, I often find it hard to slow my mind down enough to enter a fictional world. To enter a dream, there’s a process. You don’t fall asleep instantly (at least I don’t). I need time to relax, for my mind to settle, for my thoughts to drift in order to enter the dream state. White space in writing can provide a sort of meditative silence an incident or a description that allows us to enter the world of the story more fully.

White Space helps create a rhythm.

Poets know this. They arrange lines very carefully knowing that where a line breaks or falls on the page affects how the reader interprets the meaning held in the lines. Madeleine is Sleeping has a poetic, almost hypnotic quality partly because Shun-Lien Bynum varies the amount of text between one chapter to the next, effectively structuring the book like a poet would, to suggest gaps as well as connects between one chapter and the next. Effective use of white space in writing can, when words are well chosen, make images more potent and words more evocative. White space can also help lull the reader into the world of the story of the story and variety of white space, like changes in tempo, defy expectations, and keep the reader moving forward to find out what’s next.

 If you haven’t read Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum it’s a wonderful book, filled with strange, unexpected, dream-like images. Really good prose, to my mind is also poetic, inventing or adapting new forms in order to tell a story that may or many not have been told before, in an entirely fresh way.

Can You Make It Even Bigger?

Here's a creative writing exercise: Exaggerate. A lot. Experiment with hyperbole.

 Here’s a definition of hyperbole taken from dictionary.com: 1.obvious and intentional exaggeration. 2.an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as “to wait an eternity.”

Here are some examples used in everyday speech:

"He is older than the hills"
“I have told you a million times ....”
"You could have knocked me over with a feather"

Here’s an example of hyperbole used effectively in a description.

"The skin on her face was as thin and drawn as tight as the skin of onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two picks ."  —Flannery O’Connor, "Parker’s Back"

Creative Writing Exercise: 

Take a paragraph from the newspaper, a textbook, or your own writing.


Select a key word and using a thesaurus,  select the most extreme of the possible choices. For example, “upset” might be replaced with “enraged.” The exercise shakes up habitual word choices and demonstrates how different shades of meaning in a word can create a different emotional tone.

 (Examples of hyperbole taken from: http://www.dowlingcentral.com/MrsD/area/literature/Terms/hyperbole.html)

What's in a name?

”Here’s the opening of Night People by Barry Gifford: “Big Betty Stalcup kissed Miss Cutie Early on the right earlobe as Cutie drove, tickling her, causing her to swerve the black Dodge Monaco toward the right as she scratched her head." 

 What’s in a name? Page after page of Night People, I marvelled at  the names Barry Gifford came up for characters and places.  Like the story he told, the names were over the top and at the same time a perfect distillation of each character. Night People is a wonderful book in many ways, but here are three things I learned from Barry Gifford about the art of naming.

A colorful name, like a good hook, makes us want to know more.

Who is Big Betty Stalcup? Cutie Early?  Where are they going in the black Dodge Monaco? Big Betty Stalcup connotes a larger than life character and together with the name Cutie Early I am drawn into a larger than life story, possibly a satire, and I am pretty sure the story isn’t going to be about the breakup of a married couple living in Connecticut.

A evocative name is itself a shorthand character description.

Like concrete, sensory description,  a colorful name, tells us a lot  using  very little. A good name suggests what the person looks like,  his or her nationality, profession,  and/or a key personality trait.

Here are some other character names in Night People. Can you guess from the list below, who is a recent divorcee? A lawyer? A police deputy?  What else might you surmise from the names?

• Rollo Lamar
• Big Betty Stalcup
• Bobby Dean Baker
• Ernesto and Dagoberto Reyes
• Bosco Bruillard
• Vernon Duke Douglas
• Pearline Nail
• Blackie Lala
• DeLeon, Felda, Birdie, Dawn, Tequesta, Waldo
• Feo Lengua
• Mayo and Hilda Sapp
• Desoto Sturgis

A well-chosen name can conjure a world into being.

Here are some names of places in Night People:

• Fort Sumatra Detention Center for Wayward Women
• The Saturn Bar
• Swindle Ironworks
• Alligator Point
• Egypt City
• Hernando Cortés Motor Court
• Checkerboard Chuckie’s Change of Heart Bar
• Arabi
• Little Saigon
• Chalmette
• Club Spasm
• Jasper Pasco’s Fishin’ Pier and Grocery

Names locate us geographically and culturally. Think of the different street names in the places you’ve lived.  Names go along way towards describing the setting in a story. You can also use the connotations associated with certain names to create an alternate fictional reality.  For example, Egypt City to my knowledge,  doesn’t exist,  but  to me it connotes names like Memphis and Athens -- and helps me to imagine a city in the southern part of the U.S., probably somewhere between Louisiana and Florida.  (especially when included with names like Alligator Point and Chalmette).

A well chosen name can hook the reader, evoke a character, conjure a world.  As Barry Gifford writes "The world is really wild at heart and weird on top." (Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula). The names you choose go a long way towards capturing that wild, weird, wondrous world.

Six Word Sentences

"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book." 

--Friedrich Nietzsche 

How about telling a story using only six words?

According to science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, Ernest Hemingway used to bet friend and fellow writers ten dollars each that he could craft an entire story in six words. After collecting bets, this is what Hemingway supposedly wrote: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" on a napkin."

Inspired by Hemingway's challenge, Peter Berg started Six Word Stories(http://www.sixwordstories.net/)

Here are some of my favorites:

You're not a good artist, Adolf.

My Dads met at Bible camp.

Sorry soldier, shoes sold in pairs.

Single shy zombie seeks terminal necrophiliac.

Born a twin, graduated only child.

In these examples, it only takes one sentence to do what the best stories do when they work; make us laugh, make us wonder, make us cry.

As with music, a memorable sentence is a matter of selecting the right words, in the right order.
Since I love writing and want to write well, I collect the sentences I admire, in part for the pleasure of words, the music of language and the satisfaction of a story, a mood, an image distilled, palpable. I I also study sentences looking for patterns. Painters learned how to paint, by imitating the masters. It makes sense to me that to write well, one should start by imitating sentences one admires. At least, that is my project here.