Tag: Fiction Writing

My Short Play Making it to the Stage (Video Included!) & My Short Story Making it in the Finalist Category in a Writing Contest — All in One Week!

On By dotluvs2writeIn blogging, Fiction Writing, Fun, Humor, Inspirational, Playwriting, Writing Techniques8 Comments

Book. Opened book with special light. Education

This week has been an amazing blessing from God.  I am so thankful for the gift of writing He has bestowed in me since childhood, that has been able to grow more than thirty years later.  As I have mentioned in past blog posts, I wrote a play for my creative writing class in 2015 when I was in my first year of online college at Southern New Hampshire University.  I had never written a play before.  It was really a screenplay at first.  I had to write something and had absolutely zero ideas of what to write.  I didn’t want to write something overdone, regurgitated too often, and for me, that meant a love relationship or some dire storyline.  But I couldn’t pull anything from my gray matter.  It sat there, lounging, out to lunch, not wanting to be present for this assignment.  So, I decided there was nothing else to do but to just start writing whatever came to my mind, no matter how stupid or incoherent.  Hey, it’s best to just get a gaggle of words down on the paper and worry about order and lucidity later.  In this process, I wrote ten pages of a play about nothing.  I named it “Falling Up Stairs” — the topic of the discussion in the play.  Ninety-eight percent of this play was written from a stream of consciousness, which tells you a lot about my brain’s functioning power to come up with ten pages of nothing.  The other two percent was making sure it made sense.  And lo and behold, it did.  What a relief!

I turned it in the week it was due, and shared it on the discussion forum the week after and got positive feedback from both my fellow students and professor.  They found my story funny and enjoyable.  This was good to know, not only grade wise, but that I was able to pull off a play that made some people laugh.  What a joy that is!

Fast forward to this past December when the director of artistic programming after several emails with me, set up a night for actors from the local theater in which she worked to read my two plays, “Falling Up Stairs” and “The Tricker’s Treat.”  Both plays came to life through these readings, and were enhanced by these actors’ brilliant jobs of reading with such animation and emotion.  I do hope that “The Tricker’s Treat” will come to the stage next fall.  God willing…!

And from that point, I signed up for the theater’s Open Mic night that was scheduled for January 20, 2018.  If you’ve ever seen the movie Noises Off with Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, John Ritter, and Christopher Reeve, you’ll understand me when I say I felt like Michael Caine’s character, Lloyd, the director of the play.  Yes, my nerves were just about as bad as his, worrying how the play would go down in front of the live audience, and wondering if the actors had their lines completely down.  I’m an anxious sort of person, so this wasn’t unusual or surprising.

Noises Off pic of Caine taking valium

Well, I fretted over nothing (which is usually the case).  My play was performed by these three fantastic actors to a receptive audience last night (January 20, 2018).  I couldn’t have been more proud of them and their great work, or more pleased.  I am so grateful to them for having agreed to act out my play, and I thanked them both verbally and with a small gift for their effort.  You can watch the performance on the video below.

On Thursday, January 18, I received an email from a publishing company who had ran a writing contest online back in November 2017.  I was informed that my short story, “Summer Memories” had been chosen as one of the twelve finalist pieces that they will include in their anthology of short stories for this year.  I can’t tell you how incredibly thrilled, but at the same time stunned, I was that my story had been chosen.  This past November had been the first time I’d entered any of my stories in writing contests. I entered three of my short stories in three different contests, and one of them was selected.  It’s nearly impossible to express the elation I have felt from this.  My work has been recognized by editors at a publishing company.  My work that I’d edited myself and submitted thinking I may have a chance, but if my work wasn’t chosen as a finalist or didn’t win, that was all right, too.  It was a great learning experience and helped me to overcome my fear of putting my work out there for people to read and examine.  The catalyst was turning my plays over to the director at the theater.  This was the first time I’d let those in a professional field (in this case, play related) read over my work.  It broke the huge wall of fear I’d constructed for the past two years.  This fear paralyzed my ability to make headway in my writing until last October when I sent my plays to this director who was so supportive and encouraging.  Things changed rather drastically after that.  It was as if God had opened the doors and windows ahead of me as I walked this path of mine, the writing path, the path I’d been given the gift to trek.

I now wait to work with this publishing company through further correspondence on what comes next for my short story in their anthology.  I look forward to it.

The video is under eight minutes.  Please share your thoughts after watching my play on what you liked about it, and if it made you laugh.

 

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Writer’s Block “is a fabrication”

On By dotluvs2writeIn blogging, Fiction Writing, Writing Techniques4 Comments

writer's block wads of paper and pen

 

On Monday, January 8, my fiction writing workshop class at my online university starts up, and I’m reading two books:  The Lie that Tells the Truth by John Dufresne, and 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor.  I’ve already read one short story assigned for this week in the latter book, and I’m half way through the second chapter of Dufresne’s book assigned to us.  As I suspected, Dufresne’s book is excellent.  He writes with such clarity, wit, and animation, which is really fabulous for a book that’s published for teaching writing techniques to fiction writing students and beginner writers (but I think it’s valuable information for even experienced writers).  

john dufresne book the lie that tells the truth

In the first chapter assigned for us to read, he talks about getting in a routine of writing at least fifteen minutes each day in whatever place is your writing space.  If you get stuck, scan the things around your room, like a photograph of somebody or something, a colorful bird perched outside your window, or Mardi Gras beads, for example, and write about it.  You have still gotten in your writing for the day, and it wasn’t wasted because one of those items you wrote about may be useful in a future book.

In the second assigned chapter we are reading for the first week of this course that is eight weeks long (called a term, as are all undergraduate online classes at SNHU), he talks about writer’s block that clears up any ambiguity or belief in it.  Here’s an excerpt from the book on this (that I partially used in my blog title for this piece):

“Understand that if you didn’t write today, it’s because you didn’t want to. You didn’t have the perseverance or the courage to sit there. You lacked the will and the passion. Maybe you don’t enjoy it enough–we always find time to do the things we love. Your choice not to write–and it is a choice–had nothing to do with what has been called writer’s block. Writer’s block is a fabrication, an excuse that allows you to ignore the problem you’re having with your story, which means, of course, that you cannot solve the problem. But it does let you off the hook, doesn’t it? You can tell your friends, I have this strange and debilitating neurological paralysis that affects only writers and it’s untreatable. I just need to let it run its course. Saying you’ve come down with block gives something else the control over your behavior and conveniently absolves you from responsibility.

You must not accept or embrace this expedient but ludicrous notion that you can be blocked from writing. Writing is a job, like being a secretary is a job. And if you have a job, you go to work every day, or you lose the job.”

painting of author stuck

I don’t know about you, but this really opened my eyes.  After all, I thought I had “writer’s block” for nearly 18 years, as I’ve mentioned in a few of my blog posts.  But pondering those years, I was just busy and allowed all the things around me to take me away from my writing, and in most of those circumstances, they were legitimate reasons why.   Considering I was taking care of my youngest son’s special needs when he was a baby, toddler, and early grade school age, he needed to be my first priority.  It was only right he came before any thoughts of taking up writing again that I’d not touched in eight years by that time.  

But what I took away from Dufresne’s words, other than the fact that writer’s block isn’t real, is that writing is a choice and a job.  This is so important, and I am asking myself why hadn’t I considered this before?  It hadn’t even crossed my mind.  Why did I think of writing as more of a pastime or hobby?  Do published authors think what they’re doing is just a pastime or hobby?  I highly doubt it.  It’s what they do, their job. They put their hearts and souls, sweat and tears into their novels and short stories.  Therefore, what Dufresne says makes perfect sense, and these words need to be heeded and remembered always for us writers.  In fact, it would be good to jot this down in our notebooks and perhaps type them up in bolded, large print and hang it up near our writing space as a constant reminder whenever we are feeling stuck or distracted or lazy.  

In the weeks to come, I may write more blog posts on what John Dufresne has to teach us (he does teach at a college in Florida) on the techniques and art of writing.  Until then, keep on keeping on with the pen to the paper or hands on the keyboard and eyes on the  MS Word document filling up with your thoughts in black and white.

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The Most Excellent and Insightful Advice for Writers in Creating a Story

On By dotluvs2writeIn blogging, Fiction Writing, Writing Techniques7 Comments

A few weeks back, I happened upon this wonderful TEDx talk that blew me away.  The author gave step by step descriptions and instructions on how to write a story.  He brought us viewers into the imagined world of his characters.  We writers believe we know how to do this already, but we never stop learning, and I learned a great deal from this presentation.  In fact, it was the most superb, insightful, and profoundly helpful talk I’ve ever heard or seen on creating a story.  I am sharing it in the hopes that all my fellow writers will find much use in it and gain further knowledge in the art of writing.

(courtesy of and credited to TEDx Talks shared on youtube)

His tips on setting helped me tremendously in writing my latest story I began December 7.  I was thrilled to be able to apply it gently into the beginning scene of this newest work of mine, for which I am not sure whether it will be a short story, novella, or novel.  It will be fun to see where my characters and storyline lead me.

Incidentally, a book I’ll be reading for my fiction writing workshop class that starts early next month is written by Mr. Dufresne.  It’s called Lie That Tells a Truth:  A Guide to Writing Fiction.  How awesome is that?

Please share your comments below on what you thought and took away from this presentation!

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(Since I was only able to find this on youtube, I was not able to embed it directly from TED.com.)