I joined a creative writing workshop, talking about 10 rules of the game. It was fun, so I want to share it with you.
First assignment in the workshop was for us to think of ten rules of writing before receiving the tutor’s list.
And this is what I came up with:
1. Think of the unthinkable
2. Know your characters in depth
3. Set a generic plot direction instead of detailed storyline
4. See the story from a character’s perspective
5. Enjoy writing
6. When editing, read your text multi-persona
7. Be curious
8. Be brave
9. Character’s decisions in perspective/retrospective outside the story premise
10. Save. Don’t overspend
Did I have any exact hit with the tutor’s rules? Barely. Here comes his set of ten:
1. Read (widely and critically)
2. Read your work aloud
3. Think about rhythm
4. Maintain a writer’s notebook
5. Cultivate and separate the adult and the child
6. Be extreme
7. Context (everything is done for a reason)
8. Character complexity
9. Astrange yourself (different perspective)
10. Preserve the strangeness of the obvious
If we shall be trying to show that I was at the same literal frequency as the tutor of the workshop, one can always argue that my second point overlaps to a certain extend with his ideas of character complexity and sufficient context and that being brave and curious, bears some of the meaning of being extreme. But this is not the purpose of the exercise.
And then came a 5-minute task in the workshop. The idea was to write about a person coming home and how his/her reaction to the thing around the way gives information about his/her own history. There was some direction about choosing where the protagonist is coming from, what means of transportation is being used and so on.
What I wrote started with:
“It was a nearby city, but the journey back home was so long emotionally.”
And here I faced the necessity to introduce my character and wondered if s/he was a boy or a girl. Funny why this was the first decision I reckoned needed to make, I remarked to myself, and in the very next second I realised it did not at all matter. I simply wrote “this person”.
“This person” got on their bike and looked up in the sky with sketchy, layered clouds. Back in the childhood years the clouds used to be fluffy like cotton-candy and pop-corn. The road was newly paved, unlike 15 years ago when there were holes in the road and tyre workshops like milestones along the way. They were now all gone and the only thing left was shiny flickering ads.”
I was thinking of making my genderless protagonist an advertising specialist, but time was up.
As soon as the workshop was over, I opened my document with a novel, read my own rules anew and said ‘go for it’. Scrolled down to the big blank spot in the story and wrote a page of dialogue to warm me up about the things that might happen. Then I put a headline to this page – “The thinkable” and following my own advice, started a new page, titled “The less thinkable” and things stirred in a crazy whirl to which I put a pinch of spice. And there came the third page “The unthinkable” and when this one was written I was off my feet excited. It was a fresh story with potential that I was thrilled to start working with. Bearing in mind that up until this moment, I have been treating this subplot line like the most boring part of my story and therefore avoided it.
Now that it is contoured, there is only the filling with colour left to do, but I would rather wait another day for the colour patterns to crystallize.
In the meanwhile I approached another scary topic which was a place in the text where one of the characters is deficient of love and goes with the flow in a relationship. So far, my fifth rule have been broken every single time I approached this subject, but having my whole set of neatly written rules at hand, I tried to look through the character’s eyes and be curious. It didn’t fly. I cannot see any irrational rationality leading toward the decision to be taken and I am baffled because a lot of scenes are now built on a what appears to be loosely made up event in the absence of sound decision-making process. If what I thought happened never happened than what is it that did? Ad how will it affect the story? I have to do my homework with this one.
Rule six of my list is another one, I am very much looking forward to applying when I switch to the massive editing phase. To be prepared, I think about taking online acting classes.
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