Crappy First Drafts Part I

My next lesson to learn was how much work writing can be. As I said in my previous post, I'd always envisioned writing as a glamorous job. I imagined an author sitting down and writing a story from start to finish, the words flowing onto the page effortlessly, scene after scene until the story was told.

So maybe that is why, when I sat down to write my first short story for my fiction workshop, I was surprised when I found myself staring at an empty notepad, pencil in hand, for the better part of an hour. I couldn't think what to write. I had no idea where to even begin.

So I thought of a random name, Mark. I tried to create a character around this name. He lived in New York City (a place I'd never been, but that sounded cool). He was sad. And he was sitting alone at a bar. That's all I could think of.

I sat pencil in hand for another 15 minutes.

Then I thought, what if there was a woman in the bar that caught his attention. So I made him notice a woman at the other end of the bar and proceeded to describe her with every cliched phrase I could think of.

What if she approached him, I thought. Brilliant! So I decided she was a painter and that she painted people's eyes (just because that sounded different). She walks up to Mark and asks if she can paint his eyes. He agrees.

(Now I was really on a roll.)

They go back to her place and she starts to paint and while she's painting she starts asking him about himself and about why his eyes were so sad. Now I had to come up with the big finish, the big answer to why Mark was sitting alone in a bar in New York City looking sad.

So I made Mark answer (after only a very little hesitation) that his wife and child had died in a car crash back in his hometown and that he'd moved to New York to forget about the past. He even cried. She had helped him overcome his grief, and he was now able to move on with his life.

I ended the story with Mark seeing the woman's painting of his eyes in an art gallery and smiling.

Pencil down. I had written a four page masterpiece! I titled it "Windows to the Soul" (because I apparently had a thing for a good cliche) and typed up my story. I made copies for the class to read and critique and prepared to hear the praise.

Stay tuned for what the class had to say about my mini-masterpiece...

A Writer is a Reader First

It is my firm belief that all great writers start out as great readers. I have had a love affair with the written word for as long as I can remember. I have vivid memories from when I was very young, six maybe, of pulling a stack of books from my parents' bookshelf, curling up in my father's chocolate brown recliner and reading.

I think I first realized how much I loved reading in middle school, when I spent the entire summer before seventh grade staying up into the wee hours of the morning reading the entire Anne of Green Gables series. I literally (no pun intended) lost myself in those books. I was Anne, on Prince Edward Island at the turn of the century. I fell in love with Gilbert right along with her. That was really the first time I realized the power of the written word. How it could transport you to another time, another place, give you an all access pass into someone else's thoughts and feelings.

I didn't realize I was a writer, however, until my sophomore year in college. On a whim, I signed up for a fiction workshop. I felt like I needed something light in an otherwise heavy schedule (I was preparing to major in psychology and had a courseload full of classes like statistics and social psychology). As we started the course, reading through Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction and writing short stories to share with the class, I began to see all the books I'd read differently.

I'd always had this idea that stories came out all at once, that a writer sat down at their desk and typed out a novel from start to finish. I had no idea how much thought and effort it took to write a single page or paragraph or sentence. I didn't realize that you could sit down to write one story, and end up writing something completely different.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The more I learned about writing, the more I learned to read like a writer. To appreciate the beauty of a well paced plot, enjoy a particularly well-rounded character, admire a setting described so well you could feel the bitter cold or sunshine on your face. In short, I began to learn to recognize good writing when I read it. Thinking back over all the novels I'd read through my life, I realized that the ones that really stayed with me, the ones I'd read over and over, were also the ones that were written well.

So what happened next? Stay tuned for my next post, where I'll tell you about my first (awful) attempt at actually writing fiction...