Where Bad Writers Turn Good
The fantasy genre is rich with imagined monsters, creatures, and beasts. Creations which haunt our dreams and make us walk that little bit faster after dark. This article will first look at a few of the more common monsters before exploring ways to help you become Dr Frankenstein.
Writers always hear “Show don’t tell!” I remember as a newbie that phrase would be thrown at me, and I would frown at my screen every time.
So, you want to write a poem, but don’t know where to begin. Should it rhyme? Does it even have to rhyme? What about the different rules and poetry forms? Shrouded in more mystery than a school cafeteria lunch, it’s no wonder that writers can be somewhat hesitant to explore poetry.
Writer’s block. Every writer has dealt with it at some point (Stephen King claims he hasn’t but I’m calling bull), and it can be a huge deterrent when it comes to expressing yourself and getting your stories out. I will touch on some of the main issues that cause writer’s block, but the focus of this article is to explain how to push past the block and to go over the strategies I’ve personally found to be beneficial to me.
What is the purpose of poetry, the ultimate end game? The goal is to invoke a feeling, conjure an image. Anyone can spat out what a meadow looks like. Your goal as a poet is to draw your reader in with your visual descriptions. As poets we are given the gift of creating emotions for readers that perhaps even they don’t understand, we can be the ones that open the window to insightfulness. And with as dark as the world is at the moment, I find this an incredibly empowering coping mechanism.
It can be hard to convey qualities in characters, but this should help.
All writers have experienced the first draft blues. The idea for the story came to us in a flurry of inspiration; the characters sauntered through our door, greeting us with their riveting personalities. Yet, as we sat down to write the story, the sentences stumbled and clanked together in an oafish web of prose. Too... Continue Reading →
It is a common fallacy that stories are driven by plot. The truth is, the stories that last are the ones driven by character. They're the ones where we've become so attached to the characters over the years, that we simply can't let them go, rather we continue to re-imagine these characters over and over again. Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, Randle Patrick McMurphy-these characters are unforgettable, their traits carved into the memory of all readers who've met them just as if they had walked through the door and shook the reader's hand. These characters breathe and bleed upon the pages as the reader follows their stories in anticipation of what will become of them. How did their writers do it? What exactly is the perfect recipe for a character that bleeds?
It didn’t take long for me to realize that my first draft sucked with a capital “S.” Halfway through chapter one, I wanted to take it out back and beat it with a hockey stick for wasting my time. I’d like to say that this feeling dissipated as I got further into my first draft, that my confidence grew word by word, sentence by sentence. But I’d hate to lie to you. The truth is that I became more sure of the inevitable failure looming ahead of me, blocking my path to success.
Poetry is the ultimate baring of the poet's inner thoughts. Not to say all poetry will be deep and serious (just as our inner thoughts can be lighthearted and fun, so can poetry), but that regardless of the tone the poem, you can always be sure that it is a reflection of the poet's mental state when they wrote that particular poem. As such, the poet must carefully construct each poem with full consideration of tone, word choice, and structure.
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