Speaking to a Young Writing Club- bookhenge

The following is the general outline I used for speaking to a Young Writers club at Carrboro High School yesterday. They took it a lot of different, great directions with their questions, but I got to relay just about all of this information to them.

Writing Group Tomorrow

First off, I’m not some stud writer… I’m not published… and I’m not even yet licensed to teach, though I’m working on all three. My goal, for right now, is just to write. To make it a habit, to make it second nature (A habitual writer is someone who writes while they're not writing... you walk into a room and what you see can be salvaged for literary purposes, your experiences funnel into the creation of your works)… and as hard as those first three are, writing everyday can still be hard. But I have to write, I remember I was a junior in high school and I slaved over the first chapter to a book… It was the fantasy series I’d always dreamed of writing, and I very shyly asked my teacher to read it. And the next day she surprised me by saying it was one of the best things she’d ever read. She then forced me to drop Spanish and get in the Creative writing class where I spent 2 wonderful years and wrote 150 pages of one book, before deciding it wouldn’t work and writing 150 of another book… that I later decided wouldn’t work. So whats the point? I can’t stop writing, my teachers taught me that I had a unique perspective and a creation to offer that no one else would… And that’s the first thing I’d have you guys walk away with today.

-          You have a unique perspective

o   You see things, notice things, experience things differently

o   Even if we all went through the same exact events, same exact  life: what you pull out of it is different? Scene: One notices a tree, one notices the bird, one notices the sun reflecting off the water.

o   Go to any art gallery and for the most part, when you look at a landscape painting or a painting of a small village, you’re going to choose different things. What does this mean?

-          1) You offer a unique perspective, and if you choose not to write, we’ll never get to learn from it, we’ll never get to see what you would have seen, we’ll never hear that story they way you would have told it, and we wanted to, because here’s the other thing

-          You go to that same painting and you both notice different things right? One of you see’s the beautiful birds that are barely specks that the artist drew, and one loves the way the light falls on a barn at the edge of the village… And you might not have noticed that, but when they say it… you really look at another perspective, another side of the painting. In essence, you get reminded that there was more than one beautiful part of that painting.

SO, I know that’s a pretty deep start and from there its going to get a little more on the practical side… what can we do? How do we become more effective? How do we take this “unique perspective” and actually write?

My second piece of advice: Just write.

-          Journal, write poems, write short stories, work on novels.

Why?

1)      If you’re not writing 3 times a week (but why not more) it’s harder to come up with topics, its harder to sustain projects, and it’s harder to behave as writers

2)      Our power is patience… You just never know when it comes to inspiration. Sometimes it will take writing a whole book before you get to the really good idea that’s actually worth writing about.

a.       Anne Lamott- “Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go—but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”

b.      Personal example: I wrote 150 pages of a certain book, and realized I wanted the story to go differently… I sat down and wrote 150 more pages. After re-reading them both in the months that followed… I knew neither would be a publishable work. Just no chance. BUT, still today there are things in there worth salvaging. I take a character, or a setting, or a reaction, or a scene and I find a perfectly good use for it in writing that is much crisper, much more likely to be read by someone. You never know, until you’ve written and written what will be useful to you and what won’t. But never throw things away, because you don’t know when that character on page 33 will want to come bursting into another story you have… and it will be that much easier to re-create him if you have the source.

3)      Don’t limit yourself to form! Stuart Dybek's story "Paper Lantern"- Started as a poem, longer poem, short story, then full story. It released images he might not have had otherwise.

4)      Another reason to always be writing… Beyond the Pale, it’s by an editor/publisher that is speaking on YA literature. Disconnect between the writers and the teenage life they want to capture. Its been so long that their much improved writing skill cannot connect with actually being a teenager… Journal, write down your feelings and ideas and thoughts and struggles and keep that with you because one day you’ll look back, and have a much better perspective perhaps of how to capture all of that and turn it into literature. And there you are, in the pages of that journal waiting to be funneled into a real work that can actually connect with teenagers, or whoever your audience might be.

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