Games Writers Play #19: Type Other Writers’ Words

gwpA noted writer — I think it was Harlan Ellison — once wrote that a writer either heard the music or they didn’t.  If they didn’t hear the music, they were better off quitting and trying their hand at some profession which bettered suited their skills.

I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I knew exactly what he was talking about as soon as I read it.  For me, one of the great joys of being a writer is that occasionally — not all the time, and sometimes not even for great gaps of thousands of words — I get to hear the music.  There is a rhythm behind the words, a pulse behind the prose.  Rarely I hear it for the length of a short story; more often I only get a glimmer of it in a single paragraph.  It’s that moment when the hairs on the back of your neck rise, when you feel that you have created something larger than the sum of its parts.  It’s not mere words.  There’s something more there.

Honestly, it’s the reason I write.

What is the music when it comes to writing?  It is voice, syntax, word choice, story — it is all of these things and more.  The prose can be rich and textured like the best of James Lee Burke; it can also be terse and spartan like Hemmingway at his finest.  Both hear the music.

Stop by any bookstore, pick out a book at random, and chances are that the writer won’t have heard the music.  Chances are that the writing is merely servicable, that at its best it operates as an unimpeding gateway to the story; at its worst, the writing is clunky and distracting, but the story strong enough to cary the day.  And that’s all right.  Most readers read for story.  The story is the thing.  The writing usually just has to be good enough.

But a writer who can tell a great story and hears the music — ah, that’s a special writer indeed.  Those are the books that stand a far greater chance of indelibly imprinting themselves on the reader’s mind long after all other books fade into the darkness.

All of this is a prelude to today’s game.  Honestly, I’m not sure this can be taught.  I’m not even sure it can be learned.  But if it can be learned, then here’s a good way to do it:

Type other writers’ words.

When you read a passage in some work you really admire, one that really speaks to you, type that passage into your word processor.  Study it.  Soak up the rhythms and the word choices.  There’s no substitute for running millions of your own words through your fingers, but this is one way to help.  All you need in your own writing are a few notes.  A couple of beats.  Once you’ve heard it, you’ll know it’s there, and then you can begin the lifelong pursuit of stretching and expanding the music — to giving life to those limp sentences, to putting the soul behind your stories, to reaching and striving for something that, however brief, will sustain you during all those long hours of lonely struggle.

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!
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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

Postcards from the Garage: Lincoln City Book Signing

I had two book signings in the past month, but unfortunately I was so focused on, you know, the signing, that I failed to get any pictures.  But here’s one that writer J. Steven York took Saturday, May 15 when I signed books at North by Northwest Books in Lincoln City, Oregon.  I was joined by Kris Rusch and Chris York, both good friends and great writers:

swc_lc

I’m the one in the middle, just in case you were wondering.

Games Writers Play #18: Write for a Published Anthology

gwpThis game works best if you’re a short story writer, but it could work well if you’re a non-fiction essay writer as well.  The idea is simple:

Find a published anthology and write a story for it.

You’re basically pretending an editor has contacted you and requested you write a story for the book.  What I like to do is head over to Amazon.com and search specifically for anthologies.  I’ll pick one and use the anthology description as my starting point.

Now you might be thinking, hold on a minute, if the anthology is published, then what chance do I have of getting into it?  Well, of course you can’t get into that book, but trust me, there’s lots of other potential markets for your story.  I find that this idea actually works best when I haven’t read the stories in the anthology — I’m less likely to be influenced by the other writers — but I certainly encourage you to buy the book when you’re finished.  And it might be fun to see how the other writers approached the same idea differently.

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!
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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

Games Writers Play #17: One Page a Day = One Book a Year

gwpOne manuscript page — a double-spaced page with 12 point font — averages out to about 250 words.  Most writers, once they get moving, can write 250 words in 10-20 minutes.  Here’s the other amazing fact:

One page a day = one book a year.

That’s 365 pages.  Or 90,000 words.  All with only twenty minutes a day.

Whenever I’ve let myself get discouraged by how long it takes to write a book, or how little time I seem to have during the day to write, I remind myself of this fact.  Surely I can find 20 minutes somewhere during my day.

And heck, if you’re writing for forty minutes, you’re writing two books a year and considered incredibly proflic by most of the world.

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!
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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com