Janet Burroway Archives – Christina Baker Kline

May 4, 2011 By bakerkline

20 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Writing Life This Spring

My own humble flower patch ...

To be a writer is to weather the seasons: we stockpile ideas, we slumber long and hard, we wake up refreshed, and, hopefully, if we are lucky, if the soil has been properly nourished and the sun peeks through the clouds, we bloom.

To celebrate spring, and blooming, here are 20 tried and true tips that Deborah Siegel and I came up with for SheWrites. Deborah and I have been thinking a lot about this topic, as we’re teaming up to offer a pilot mini-retreat on May 21 in Brooklyn for fellow mamas/grandmamas/caregivers who also write. (We thought we’d start with this group, because such women are multitasking mavens, but in the fall we will broaden our scope!)

Alrighty then. Here is our list. I hope you’ll find it…rejuvenating! And I invite you to add to it, in comments, with tips of your own:

1. Forgive yourself for all that you haven’t written before today.

2. Stop worrying about the fact that you’re wasting time. Of course you are. That’s what writers do.

3. Pay attention. Here. Now. Look for inspiration anywhere you can find it. Everything you take in will be filtered through the lens of your current obsession.

4. Allow yourself to play—with language, with direction. Come at things sideways, in the backdoor, through the attic.

5. Set a deceptively small goal for today: One great sentence.

6. Reconnect with your passion for the beauty of that great sentence. Love the metaphor, the texture, the juxtaposition.

7. Read what you want to write. “Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.” –Jennifer Egan

8. Write what you want to read.

9. Live where you are. “All writing is autobiographical as well as invented. Just as it’s impossible to write the whole and literal truth about any experience, so it’s also impossible to invent without drawing on your own experience, which has furnished your brain.” –Janet Burroway

10. Remember that creating art is a messy process. “Beauty follows ashes. That which is lovely does not rise out of the pristine hollows of the universe but out of roiling, disjointed substance of our lives.” –Christin Taylor

11. Just for today, write in an unaccustomed place. Take yourself somewhere new. Get out of town.

12. Schedule an “artist date” with yourself. (Remember those?)

13. Remember that direction + desire = productivity.

14. Allow yourself to love your own writing. Allow yourself to hate it. Remember that reality is probably somewhere in between.

15. Give yourself permission to be creative, distracted, self-involved—and maybe even bigger than the people around you.

16. Get inspired by the visual and tactile. Cut pictures out of magazines, tape postcards on the wall above your desk.

17. Watch your favorite movie, or listen to your favorite song, with an ear for the narrative.

18. Only connect, as E.M. Forster said. Recruit yourself—and maybe some writers around you—for a retreat to someone’s friend’s cabin (or, if near Brooklyn, come to ours!). Produce pages to share, and join up for food and conversation.

19. Join a group you’ve been lurking around on She Writes, or start one of your own.

20. Remember that you can’t rejuvenate in the abstract. You have to put pen to paper. Ready? GO.

Now, you:

Tell me YOUR top 3 tips for rejuvenating your writing life, in comments to this post. (I know you’ve got them!)

To your blooms!

May 11, 2010 By bakerkline

Revising Nonfiction

Sometimes when you’re revising it helps to have a specific assignment. Last week in this space I listed some exercises that my fiction-writing students find useful. Here are some revision ideas that my memoir and journalism students particularly like:

1) Write down three adjectives (beautiful, aggressive, haughty) that describe a character in your narrative/memoir. (Be sure the adjectives describe different qualities, not the same ones. For instance, handsome, well-groomed, muscular are too similar, as opposed to handsome, talkative, and mechanically inclined, which reveal different aspects of the character.)

Without using any of the adjectives (or synonyms), write a half-page scene or passage that shows the character engaged in action and perhaps speaking some dialogue that will suggest the selected qualities.

2) List 10 objects in your main character’s bedroom, car, living room, or other place. Make these objects as specific as possible, giving titles of books, contents of photographs, kind of junk food, etc. Three of these objects should be connected to the story. Using this list, write a half-page description of the character’s space, mentioning the objects or other elements of the décor (such as paint color) that will give readers clues to character.

3) Cut your story into scenes, summary, and flashbacks. Number each piece in the order in which it appears. Then lay these pieces out on a table or floor and see what you’ve got. How many scenes are there? Is every scene necessary? Can some be combined, deleted, or summarized? Are important scenes buried in sections of summary? Are there missing scenes? Is the material from the past in the right places? Try rearranging the sequence of events. Experiment. Move beyond fiddling with sentences to this kind of re-envisioning and rearranging.

4) Choose a moment from your story-in-progress that could benefit from intensifying a character’s emotional or physical experience.

Focus on the place: the sights, smells, and weather. For three minutes, free-write sensory details as rapidly as possible in present tense. Look back and select the most striking or significant sensory details. Look for places they might fit into the original passage. Rewrite the opening paragraph, moving slowly, incorporating some of these details.

5) Write three different endings. Think about what is resolved and what is left unresolved with each ending.

6) And finally — this is so obvious I hesitate to put it on the list, and yet I’m always amazed at how many of my students consider it a novel idea. Retype at least one full draft, “making both planned and spontaneous changes as you go,” as Janet Burroway advises. “The computer’s abilities can tempt us to a “fix-it” approach to revision, but jumping in and out of the text to correct problems can result in a revision that reads like patchwork.”

July 6, 2009 By bakerkline

Making Conversation

Dialogue is hard to get right. It has to sound like natural speech, when in fact it’s nothing like it.

I like to send my creative-writing students out to cafes and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. hopper 1

Inevitably their written dialogue little resembles the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue, you have to eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter and cut to the core of the exchange — unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. (The writer George Garrett called this “dovetailing.”) At the same time, it has to sound natural, like something someone would really say.

Richard Price, in his recent novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway says, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.

Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with each other. Their conversations are full of surprises – self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence. But it sounds real: his characters’ speech has kinetic energy; it crackles with life. Real life.

June 14, 2009 By bakerkline

Language Geek, #1: Wendepunkt

Wendepunkt is a German word that means turning point. In Modernism, Ray Bradbury defines wendepunkt as the moment in a novel “in which there is an unexpected yet in retrospect not unmotivated turn of events, a reorientation which one can see now is not only wholly consistent but logical and possibly even inevitable.” This moment often involves a reversal of the protagonist’s fortunes. Aristotle called it peripeteia, the crisis action of a tragedy.

wendepunkt In her masterful guide to narrative craft, Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway says, “A reversal of some sort is necessary to all story structure, comic as well as tragic. Although the protagonist need not lose power, land, or life, he or she must in some significant way be changed or moved by the action.” This internal and external change, when it comes, may surprise the reader, but should be organic to the plot. Whether shocking or confusing or exhilarating, it should feel intrinsic to the story.

20 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Writing Life This Spring

Revising Nonfiction

Making Conversation

Language Geek, #1: Wendepunkt

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