Nuts & Bolts
Tools of the Trade

Ideas to Use Tomorrow to Improve Your Writing

At the Fiction Writing Tool Kit panel during the June 9th Washington Writers Conference, four novelists and short story writers Leslie Pietrzyk, Doreen Baingana, Mary Kay Zuravleff, and Amy Stolls, share their shortcuts and secrets to helping you improve your craft and find where your work fits in the tight publishing marketplace.

Getting In the Right Frame of Mind

Getting started is one of the hardest parts about writing, said Stolls, manager of the literature grants program at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and author of Palms to the Ground. For Stolls getting into that space, mentally and physically, is vital to her writing. Since she’s not a full-time writer, Stolls’ writing time is limited to the early hours of the morning. It’s tight, but writing for two hours before going to work gets her creative juice flowing as she begins her day.

Warm up exercises are always inspiring to her so early in the morning too. Reading a favorite poem helps with getting into the right frame of mind and also to get into the language or style of her writing.

Stolls also finds that she loves to write in public places and encourages other writers to do this too. People’s actions and movements in public places inspire epiphanies and descriptions you may not be aware of while by yourself. You can also get to know yourself as a writer in different settings too. Quiet places may bring out the thoughtful writer, while louder places may bring out the quicker and more active part of your writing. Explore these different styles and see which one you like better.

Pay Attention to Details

One of the most important things that can help writers improve their writing is attention to details, and having very good details at that. Moderator Pietrzyk, author of A Year and a Day and Pears on a Willow Tree, stressed that everyone should at the least know what the MacMillan Visual Dictionary is, and at best they should own it.

 The MacMillan Visual Dictionary is dictionary comprised of explicit drawings and diagrams, which provide either exterior views or labeled cutaways of a variety of objects. The dictionary is a perfect tool for writers to utilize for writing about subjects you may not be well acquainted with.

The core of a good story is believability—not only in the story but in the author as someone who knows what he or she is writing about. Whether or not you know a lot or only a little, make them “real good details”, good enough to fool readers. Keep in mind that readers aren’t going to know how a firefighter pulls a hose out of a fire truck or how a doctor stitches up a wound, but a writer’s attention to detail will convince them that after reading that description they just might know how to use a fire hose or stitch up a wound.

Another area that writers may need help in improving is writing dialog—one of the most difficult feats in writing. Many writers struggle with dialog because most are not able to create distinct voices for their characters. Dialog is not just the spoken word, said Pietrzyk, but also the attitudes and mannerisms that accompany each character. Like all things that need perfecting, mastering this skill takes time and exercise. Here Pietrzyk provided several exercises that might assist you in your dialog writing.

EXERCISE 1: How might different people express these feelings through their speech? What gestures, facial expressions, or verbal clues might you include to show these people as they speak?

            Example: I don’t know.
            Teenager: “How should I know? Why’re you asking me?”
            (Shoulders shrugging, eyes rolling, her voice trailing off)
            Farmer: “Don’t rightly got no idea.”
            (Reaching down to grab a handful of dirt and staring at it)
            Lawyer: “It isn’t clear at this time.”
            (Spoken in a clipped voice while tapping expensive pen on a legal pad)
            Mother: “Sweetie, I’m afraid Mommy doesn’t have an answer for you.”
            (Bending down to fuss with blanket in stroller)

EXERCISE 2: Much occurs during most conversations beyond the words spoken. Write a list of 15 (or more) actions that might happen as two people talk:
--during dinner
--while riding public transportation
--while driving

EXERCISE 3: Select a small section of a fine film. Start the film. Do not look at the screen. Listen to the dialogue and any other sounds. Replay the same section of the film this time with the sound off. Note carefully what you see—where the camera focuses. Now replay that scene watching and listening. Then go to a scene you’ve written and see how the experience might give you new choices in cutting and editing.
~from Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway

EXERCISE 4: Imagine a seemingly peaceful family of four—mother, father, daughter, son—sitting at the dinner table. One of them has a confession to make to the family, but is afraid to reveal it. Through the subtleties of body language and dropped hints, the confession is divulged, though it is never explicitly expressed. Who has the confession to make? What is it? How is it divulged? What is the family’s reaction? What is the confessor’s reaction to the family?
~from Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway

State the Conflict of Your Story

Ugandan writer and author of Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe, spoke next about improving your writing, focusing on revision. When asked, stated Baingana, most writers do not know what their story is about. What’s on paper and what’s in your head usually are two very different things. Baingana’s advice: “Write one sentence to state the conflict of your story.” One sentence should be all it takes. If you have to go beyond that, it’s likely that you don’t know the conflict of your own story.

Once you have established the conflict, continued Baingana, revision is next, and revise accordingly with your conflict. Revision is about taking away rather than adding to whatever is already there. If you have to add something, it has to be essential to the conflict. Analyze each paragraph from afar. Is the paragraph too descriptive? Does the paragraph get you to the next stop? Is it repetitive? If that paragraph is doing nothing to affect the conflict, then remove it from your story.

Baingana also discussed setting. “Real good details” as stated by Pietrzyk is good to have, but being too descriptive can also be harmful. We’ve all heard of the “Show me and not tell me” technique that most writers are victims of. Baingana suggested focusing on the senses. When writing about a sound, blindfold yourself and listen carefully. Plug your ears and write about how a car looks as it races down the street. Feel something with only your fingers. Take out all the other senses that might interfere with you as you write about a subject. See how much crisper it reads as you write it.

Be Prepared To Be Discovered

Until you know what you’re writing about, don’t tell others you’re a writer, stated Mary Kay Zuravleff jokingly. Zuravleff, teacher and author of The Bowl Is Already Broken and The Frequency of Souls, knows a thing or two about this as do most writers, she suspected. “How many times have you told someone you’re a writer, and when they ask what you’re working on, Ums and Ahs are all that come out of your mouth?” (More than several hands shoot up.)

Improving your writing means being able to know what you’re writing about inside and out. Maybe you don’t need to know exactly what it takes to be a doctor or a firefighter, but that you’re writing about a doctor whose conflict is that he really wants to be a firefighter. You should be able to teach your book as if it was the subject of a class project.

Focusing on the marketing of your book, Zuravleff pointed out that you can’t begin to market your exquisite piece of work until you’ve got a concrete idea what it is and have a succinct description of it. After you’ve accomplished this, Zuravleff continued “Be prepared to be discovered.” This means that polish everything you’ve done up to then and build on it with business cards, your own Web site, and post cards.

Postcards are extremely memorable. For Zuravleff, the postcard of her book, helped get her on NPR’s The Kojo Nnambdi Show. “My publicist had been trying to get me on his show for quite some time. So when I found out he was the keynote speaker at the 2005 Writers Conference, I approached quietly and handed him my postcard for my book, and said ‘I know you’re very busy. I just wanted you to know I’m the author of this book and perhaps we can talk about it sometime.’ He immediately said ‘Oh I know this book. You’re going to be on my show.’” And sure enough Zuravleff was on The Kojo Nnambdi Show several weeks later.

“A schedule is a net to catch days.”

Whether your writing needs improvement on attention to detail, dialog, revision, marketing, or just plain getting inspiration to start, the one thing that the panelists stressed was continue to write daily. For Baingana a writing partner helped her to keep going. For Zuravleff keeping a schedule moved her along. Stolls found that routine made her day. As you continue to write and improve on your writing, check out some of these helpful tools to keep you going (provided by Pietrzyk).

Writing Books

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
The Art of Fiction & Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
Letters to a Fiction Writer by Bonnie Friedman
Creating Fiction Creating Fiction by Julie Checkoway
Building Fiction by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Creative Nonfiction by Philip Gerard
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
Writing Without the Muse: 50 Beginning Exercises for the Creative Writer by Beth Baruch Joselow
What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays & Pamela Painter

Graduate Writing Programs

Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP): www.awpwriter.org
Choosing an MFA program(blog) http://creative-writing-mfa-handbook.blogspot.com

Writing Organizations

The Writers Center www.writer.org
Women’s National Book Association www.wnba-books.org/wash
Washington Independent Writers www.washwriter.org

Conferences

Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference (Vermont-August) www.middlebury.edu/~blwc
Sewanee Writers Conference (Tennessee-July) www.sewaneewriters.org
Writers at the Beach (Delaware-March) www.writersatthebeach.com
Washington Writers Conference (Washington, D.C.-June) www.washwriter.org

Blogs

Work-in-Progress http://www.workinprogressinprogress.blogspot.com/
Maud Newton (literary) http://maudnewton.com/blog/
The Elegant Variation (literary http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/
Miss Snark (literary agent) http://misssnark.blogspot.com/
Buzz, Balls & Hype http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/buzz_balls_hype/

Writing Scams

www.sfwa.org/beware
www.agentquery.com (click on “beware of scammers”)