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Things to do on a Tuesday
Write what you try to forget
Write about a time you changed your mind
Once, with another woman …
Something stolen
While you were driving
These were my mistakes
In my grandmother's house
I'm thinking of …
Write about a summer fling
You are lost
What you see in the distance
You thought nobody noticed
This is what you need for the journey
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Form will come organically out of what you write. You can trust your pen and the page to tell you what it wants to be. Especially during writing practice sessions or free-writes. When you let go of any preconceived ideas of what you want to write, you set free a tremendous energy to write what wants to be written.
For beginning and less experienced writers especially, it's important to let the piece find it's own way. Begin with an image - "first thought, best thought," Allen Ginsberg, among others, tells us. Catch any loose tail of the image and hang onto it, following where it takes you. Let your pen follow the hills and gullies of it; wander among the rushes and wildflowers. Don't worry about trying to fit the writing into a form. Never mind beginnings, middles and ends. Just keep writing and trust. Know that it may take some time. You've got time. Remember, this is a lifelong journey your are on, not just an afternoon jaunt to the beach.
What started as a memory may evolve into a prose poem. A character sketch is suddenly a scene with two characters in dialogue and one of them is pretty mad. A piece on what you learned in high school geometry begins to read like the nub of a personal narrative.
When you trust your self and your writing, and let the piece emerge as it wants, you may be surprised to find yourself in the midst of writing in a genre or format you never expected or intended.
"One may do anything," the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said. "This alone corresponds to the whole breadth life has."
This is not to say that you'll know how to accomplish what your writing sets out to be. Suppose you find yourself with the makings of a short story. Or what seems like a short story. The writing that comes spontaneously during free writing, and even during rewriting and editing, may be only the shadow of a story, bones that need flesh and muscle put to them. How do we know what to do next?
If you believe that what you're writing wants to be a short story, then you write the draft of the complete story as best you can. Bear in mind if you've never studied the form, you probably won't know how to do it. So you become a student of the short story. Read some of the best from collections and anthologies. The annual anthology, THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF ______ (Houghton Mifflin), is an excellent series. Find books on writing the short story and study them. Get a teacher, attend workshops and classes.
The same goes for poetry or essays, plays or screen plays.
Don't expect to know innately how to complete any of these forms of writing even if the writing naturally gravitates toward a particular genre. During the course of your life as a writer, you may work in many different formats. Think of writers like John Updike, Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood. Fiction, non-fiction, criticism, poetry, essays. They do it all. Others find a form and write only in that genre.
Sometimes, too, you may find yourself writing a piece of fiction but rather than narrative, it wants to be a screenplay. You can see the whole thing cinema graphically as it runs through your mind's eye like a movie. Or you hear dialogue and see the set and know what you thought was a novel really should be written as a stage play. A poem grows and lengthens and soon you have a prose poem, or perhaps the beginnings of a novel.
Writing is experimentation. Ideas and concepts or images may transform themselves into dozens of forms before you find the one that's right.
Go back through you notebooks and find a writing practice piece that you started, but didn't get to far with. Make sure it's a piece that interests you and that you want to explore. Spend some time with it, write it further and see where it wants to go. Do you see where it might evolve into a something other that how it began?
Pull out a piece that never quite worked but you weren't sure why. We all have a few that we've stuffed away in some filing drawer, or in our dresser beneath our socks. Reread it, not from a critical perspective, but like an adventurer looking for the next calling. Mark what holds promise - maybe you like the characters but the short story never worked. Or it's factual enough, after all it's what really happened, but it's a little boring. It could be a piece of memoir that needs to be fictionalized. Or maybe there are too many words. Cut back a piece of narrative to a lovely prose poem.
Play with, experiment, explore. Take your time. Let go of expectations and enjoy the ride.
Notes on Writing >>>
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