Who is this post for?
- If you want to write clearer
- If you want to write more creatively
- If you want to journal, but don’t know how to start
I’ve been studying the following over the past couple of months to help improve my writing. The books aren’t in any specific order.
Writing Down the Bones (WDTB) and Creativity Rules! (CR!) emphasize the creative process. Several Short Sentences About Writing (SSSAW) and On Writing Well (OWW) emphasize the editing process.
I first read WDTB years ago. That reading has faded from memory. This time through I read it more carefully. Goldberg’s basic premise is to instill a regular writing practice into your routine. Here’s a few of her ideas
- Keep a running tally of topics that you think of, inspiration for topics that you’ve seen somewhere else, and snippets of overheard conversations. You’ll have a steady stream of raw material to work with.
- Strive for quantity, not quality.
- To become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot.
- Write a good first sentence and then see where the writing wants to go. Example: “A husband and wife discovered that their children are fakes”. Natalie Goldberg attributes this style to the poet Russel Edson, who I’m not yet familiar with.
I also first read CR! years ago. This book contains short writing prompts, sometimes several on a page, and the chapters cover plot, story, characters, and so on. Each prompt is designed to encourage some writing from you. My first reading of this was in 2004!–I found a Moleskine notebook on my shelf that had some of the exercises in them. Here’s a few examples of the exercises, from then and from now.
- Imaginary scene: I’m sitting on my west facing balcony, watching the setting sun while drinking a Wanderlust IPA from the Breakside Brewery. A hawk lands on the balcony rail, and starts talking to me. What? A bird that knows verbs?
- Alliterate something: Bob’s big belly bestowed blue blobs beneath Bob’s butt.
- Make some lame analogies: His lips smacked onto the slice of pepperoni pizza, drooling like a bull dog in the chew toy aisle at PetSmart.
SSSAW is my least favorite in this series, only because the poetic format of the book didn’t really appeal to me. But, here’s some learnings
- The problem with prewriting an outline is that it stifles creativity. How do we know what we are writing about until we write it?
- A writer’s job is making sentences, fixing sentences, killing sentences, and rearranging sentences
- It’s easier to tell what you are saying in a short sentence
- Creating requires both creativity and critical review
OWW is my most recent read. Zinsser mostly focuses on non fiction writing, but the principles can be applied to any genre. In some respects, it’s similar to SSSAW
- “But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to it’s cleanest components.”
- “Very few sentences come out right the first time. Or even the third time”
- Find the right words “A thesaurus is to a writer as a rhyming dictionary is to a songwriter”
- “Look for your material everywhere”–for inspirational sources he points to road signs, package labels, instructions for toys, content in junk mail and everywhere else in our world. (This dovetails well with one of the tips from WDTB)
- Find the correct verbs, and the correct nouns, which will eliminate unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, This step will also personalize your writing.