Refresh your writing through rewriting: A Simple Solution to the problem of ‘dull’ story writing.
The problem.
Many students tell me that their creative writing task lets them down.
Perhaps for the following reasons:
- You run out of ideas.
- Your writing does not use a varied vocabulary.
- Your structure is all over the place.
- Your writing lacks figurative techniques.
- Your writing does not shine!
Solution.
Give yourself ten minutes every day to copy a few sentences from a book.
- Now I appreciate that copying out passages sounds dull. Repetitive. Like lines! Yes?
- No. Quite the opposite actually. Copying out passages from favourite books or successful authors , helps your brain to remember how to write differently.
- In fact, copying out passages imprints your brain with new approaches.
- It boosts your language options, generates fresh ideas and helps you to hear your own writing differently.
- You become more aware of metaphor, of the unsettling effect of speech and why repetition gives your observations that extra quality.
Try This:
Here’s an example from a story by Ray Bradbury called The Fog Horn.
Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.
“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like the trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”
The Fog Horn blew.
Or try this one:
Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern. And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life—good or bad—had been set in motion that morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.
Dennis Lehane, Live by Night
Or this:
The hair was curled,
and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable.–It was a
wretched business indeed!–Such an overthrow of everything she had been wishing
for!–Such a development of everything most unwelcome!–Such a blow for
Harriet!–that was the worst of all. Every part of it brought pain and
humiliation, of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all
was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken– more
in error–more disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the
effects of her blunders have been confined to herself.
“If I had not persuaded Harriet into liking the man, I
could have borne anything. He might have doubled his presumption to me– but
poor Harriet!”
Jane Austen Emma.
Maybe try this one:
I live in a well. I live like smoke in the well. Like vapor in a stone throat. I don’t move. I don’t do anything but wait. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when I don’t know?
Ray Bradbury, The One who waits.