Please Prompt Me

March 20, 2014 / Lisa / 7 Comments

I am tasked with coming up with some writing prompts. I’m promptly challenged.

This is a topic I’ve talked about before, but keep coming back to. A wonderful, artistic friend, Lisa, over at satsumabug.com sent me writing prompts on a regular basis and I had fun with those. What I found, though, was that I picked the topics that interested me rather than ones that challenged me as a writer. I’d grab something fun, scribble a little, and feel like I met my obligation. I learned that those fun little interludes were great for warming up my brain so I could then dive into whatever my work in progress was. Rather like priming the pump.

I can also see lots of uses for them. To warm you up, as I mentioned above. To make you think about specific ways to write something you might normally struggle with, such as setting, description, dialog, etc. To force you to try a different style than what your normally do, such as present tense, first person, and so on. So I see them as beneficial even though, as I confessed above, I might not take advantage of these as I should.

One conference I attended gave us prompts with five minutes to write each one. For a half hour session she gave us four prompts, which meant she only had ten minutes that she had to actually speak to us. Supposedly the prompts were to encourage us to free-style write, to release the subconscious. Personally, my problem has always been more reining in that rampaging subconscious and imagination. For this upcoming event, I definitely do not want the audience looking at prompts as filler for speakers who have nothing to say.

A more relevant question for me at the moment though, is what should the prompt be? Reminds me of a creative writing course I took many, many years ago. The teacher told us to write about a peanut. I thought that was silly until I wrote and had fun. But really, trying to come up with an original prompt that will stimulate the imagination, not be something that’s been done thousands of times before, and that actually challenges a writer…well, I’m clueless.

Though I’m fascinated by asking writers to write a scene in a tense they normally don’t write in, because writing in present tense is so difficult for the majority of writers. I do believe, pondering prompts in this blog has given me at least one idea.

And I’d love your thoughts on prompts in general.

Word Conundrum

March 6, 2014March 6, 2014 / Lisa / 7 Comments

Which comes first, the final edit or the readers?

I have become hooked on the Game of Throne series and noticed that there are places where I skim. In some spots there will be paragraphs of names, as in before a battle starts, when the author lists everyone who’s there. I don’t really care; I want to see the fight. Plus, with all the names I’ll figure out who they are if they show up again.

The point is though, that I skim whole sections. And there’s that old adage that if the reader skims, that should be the part the writer leaves out.

And there’s my dang conundrum. By the time readers are skimming and making note of that in reviews, the book is out of my hands. There’s nothing I can do about it. Hopefully an editor is honest enough to point out the places readers might be tempted to skip, but obviously that isn’t foolproof. On top of that, what one reader finds boring another will not. If you left out stuff everyone skims you’d probably end up with two pieces of cardboard with great cover art and just empty space in between.

That leads to the old dilemma about editing: how to stop. It used to be once a book was published there was nothing more you could do. If there was a typo or a long passage people skipped, it was there for posterity, or at least until the next printing. These days, the temptation is to take the book back, make changes, and republish it.

Think about the chaos that could cause. Multiple versions of your book. And think about the temptation to revise in a series. You could be working on book three or book ten and realize you should have added a character sooner, or tossed in something in book two that would allow you to justify what you want to do to your character in book eight. Readers would be so confused. A clue that existed in version two of book one isn’t in version three, and on and on. I imagine the writer would be pretty confused, too.

However even though it’s possible these days to edit forever, obviously you shouldn’t. Still though, there are those skimming sections that I bet authors wish all the readers pointed out before publication. It’s too bad we can’t do a preliminary publication, similar to an audience screening of a movie. Something where more readers than just five or six would weigh in.

Oh well. Meandering brain this rainy afternoon.

Going, Going, Gone

February 21, 2014December 22, 2014 / Lisa / 9 Comments

Have you ever noticed how things come in clusters? As if the universe is afraid you won’t notice something if only one message is sent?

A few weeks ago a local woman passed away. She had dementia, which most of us didn’t even know. She was in the early stages, but then she quickly worsened and died before many even knew she was ill. It made me sad to think I wasn’t able to visit with her or say our farewells.

A few days ago my sister mailed me some old letters I had written. One included a story about my fire department days and a call on Christmas Eve. As I read the letter I realized I’d completely forgotten that story. I told my husband, who’d been on the call with me, although he wasn’t a hubby at the time, and he’d forgotten it, too. It made me wonder how many other stories are long gone.

And then today on the way home from errands I heard a radio program about dementia. The first thing the speaker said was, if you were diagnosed with dementia and knew you were going to lose your memories, what would you do?

My immediate thought was, I’d write them down. That I’d get out the paper and pen and write down every single memory I could think of.

That thought was followed by: why wait?

These kind of questions come up whenever you think about mortality. What would you do if you only had a week to live? A month? A year? When I was diagnosed with lymphoma I never once thought it was terminal. But my husband kept asking me what I wanted to do, and I finally realized he needed to have a plan. So I told him I wanted to go to Alaska. Which I do, but the answer was more to help him than because I thought time was limited. Which is probably why I still haven’t gone to Alaska.

But even with things like that, the question still stands. Why wait? Beyond the obvious answers of no time off from work, no finances, etc. All legitimate reasons for putting things off.

None of those reasons though, are excuses for not writing your memories down. Some day, we’re going to forget. Even if it’s just due to time, as in that firefighter story in the old letters.

And some day, someone will be very thankful that you made time while you still could.