WARNING: Literary investigators have determined that the guest host of tonight's edition of Write On! has NO PUBLISHED WORKS. Her comments may appear witty and insightful, but they are NOT necessarily reliable and may NOT point the way to instant fame. Always consult your authorized Muse before starting a new writing regime. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
Write On! goddess Sensho is still out dealing with family illness issues, so you're still getting subs. We're all hoping to see her back soon.
Five years ago I took a writing course at Vroman's, a famous local bookstore in Pasadena. I hadn't written a fictional word since college, over 30 years before.
There were nine of us plus our teacher. She was a published writer of literary fiction, replete with dead babies and haunted tormented memories. We sat around the table eying one another suspiciously while she talked about the anguish of writing, how you have to rip your soul in two and encourage an eagle to eat your liver, how she had to rewrite an entire novel she'd spent years on because she realized that she'd used the wrong POV. "It wasn't the psychotic mother's story," she said. "It was the murdered daughter's." Then she got onto characterization. "What monster inside your character is telling the story?" she demanded.
Well, I'd already paid my money, so I stuck it out, even though I couldn't visualize a protagonist equipped with a chatty Minotaur, and all I wanted was to learn how to write reasonably good murder mysteries.
But in the next class, the monster in the teacher stopped telling the story and the craftsman stepped in. You sit down and write every day, she said, for at least an hour (more, of course, if you don't have another job). Doesn't matter how you FEEL about it. Start with an image or a situation, or a conversation, that interests you, and see where it takes you. Double-space. If you change POV, indicate it with asterisks or a chapter break. Do it again the next day and the next and the next. And turn in ten pages by next Tuesday.
Ah ha. I said to myself, "Self," I said, "this writing gig is like gardening or running or cooking or painting or dancing or lawyering. You have to do a lot of it in order to get better at it. And once you have and you are, you can talk about monsters and eagles and the mystery of the act of creation all you want. Or not."
So rip your soul in two if you insist, but make sure you do it every single day for at least an hour a day. More if you're not working another job.
TONIGHT'S CHALLENGE:
Take two well known characters from fiction (or fact), one of them unsympathetic, the other one sympathetic. Write a conversation or an encounter between them. Do it from the POV of the unsympathetic character (Bonus! That character probably comes equipped with monster!). Lead the reader to feel sympathy or understanding with the unsympathetic character.
Suggestions:
Vernon Dursley and Harry Potter in HP
Bob Ewell and Jem in To Kill A Mockingbird
Huck's father and Huck in Huckleberry Finn
Josie Pye and Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables
Saruman and Gandalf from LOTR
Captain Hook and Peter Pan
the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood
one of Cinderell's stepsisters and the fairy godmother