Pneumonia: by Devi Laskar

I’ve recently discovered “Brain Pickings” and it is just wonderful. Maria Popova authors a writing blog and there are several pieces that I just discovered today that are informative and exciting and speak to the writer and the writer in training.

My two favorites thus far:

1. Writing advice from John Steinbeck. Yet, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963, Steinbeck issued this disclaimer: “If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”

2. Writing advice from Kurt Vonnegut. Ms. Popova included a video clip of Vonnegut dispensing his own advice and it’s worth watching. My favorite quote from Vonnegut: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

That’s so true. I think my story right now has double pneumonia and is sitting in the ICU receiving oxygen froman  iron lung. 🙂

Poets & Writers posted its version of a “concept map” that they label ‘Hierarchy of Regret.’ For all you nonfiction writers, and even fiction writers, it may be a useful exercise to complete, and to get a “visual” on some topics you want to explore or that you want your characters to tackle.

“Think about big and small regrets you have in your life—things you wish you had done, people you wish you had treated better, directions you wish you’d gone. Draw a chart that represents a hierarchy of your regrets. It can be simple or decorative, straightforward or complex. Then write an essay that explores what you see when you look at it.”

And I’m reposting another writing prompt from P&W that appeared a couple of months ago:

Description and Speculation: Write for twenty minutes, without stopping, a piece of pure description about something you see (a person, a scene, or an object in the room). No dialogue, no metaphor, no emotion; just pure description, as detailed as possible. Then write, nonstop, for another twenty minutes about the same subject, but this time use only speculation—imagine the subject’s thoughts, perceptions, emotions, inner, or outward dialogue, etc.—and/or your own thoughts and observations about the subject. Combine the two pieces, and see what kind of story comes to life.

So, what are you planning to write today? What problems are you going to transform into dynamic solutions?

Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan and is working on a novel.