There is an exercise that is often taught in acting classes, and most actors hate it. They not only hate it, they deride it and spend countless years after their initial training parodying it and using it as an example of why it’s completely useless to study acting. That exercise is to “Be a Tree.”

It’s an exercise that I actually like, although I teach it slightly differently, I think, than some do.

• Stand or sit. Standing is probably better, but it isn’t really important.
• Shut your eyes or keep them open. Actually, keeping them open might work better for various reasons, but again, it isn’t really important.
• Feel your roots. Here’s where it gets squidgy for some actors. “I don’t have any roots,” they think. Feel them anyway. Feel them spreading out into the ground beneath you. Feel them pulling water and nutrients from the soil. Feel the moisture moving up them into your trunk.
• Feel your trunk. Same as above. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have one. Feel the rough bark on your surface, the more spongy interior that is pulling the water from your roots and sending it up to your branches and leaves, that is taking the energy from your leaves down to your roots so they can grow further out into the soil.
• Feel your branches and leaves. Feel the warm sunlight shining on your leaves and the energy you pull from it and send down your trunk to your roots.
• Feel the breeze moving your leaves, your branches. The gentle sway it causes.
• Notice the squirrel running up your trunk and down your branches. Notice the family of birds there. Hear the chicks begging the parents for food.
• Stay with this for a while.

Why do I like this exercise? Besides that I’m odd and think it’s fun (I once pretended to be a salmon swimming upstream to spawn), it also opens up your ability to imagine, to experience that which is, by definition, foreign to you. As a writer, you will often require of yourself that you develop and make real something you haven’t and couldn’t experience. Your ability to imagine it fully and viscerally is vital. The more you practice this, the easier it is when you need it.

So, be a tree.

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a30)

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Photo by Dave Eadie – copyrighted but licensed for further reuse

We all have gnomes that follow us around and pop up at the most inopportune time. Some of yours might be named “I’m Just Not Good Enough” or “They Must Know Better Than Me” and “I’m Not Capable”. A writer might have a gnome called “No One Would Care About What I Have to Say” or even the dreaded “I Don’t Have the Talent”. One of mine is named “It’s Not Going to Work.” They are insistent little beasts. You think you’ve vanquished them only to find them sitting next to you on the couch, looking up at you with oh, so innocent little eyes.

When they show up, our first instinct is to either completely ignore them or slay them, quickly and soundly. However, history tells us that the little beasts refuse to be ignored for long and are not known to stay slain, so what must we do?

I say, first we must acknowledge them. That in itself will defuse much of their power. Then it might be productive to see where they’ve come from. Most of our gnomes are there because at one time they were protecting us from something. Who knows what at this point. Perhaps the hurt received from a misguided friend or an uncomprehending adult. Perhaps the slight from a bully. It’s probably not important to know what, exactly, but once you see that they are only there for your good, you can look at them in a completely different way.

Rather than trying to slay them, you might consider looking after them, caring for them.

“I see you hiding there behind the television set,” you might say. Bid them come sit next to you, hug them and tell them softly, “You have done a wonderful job of protecting me. Thank you so much. I am very grateful. I’m much stronger, now, and can protect myself, so you can go outside and play.” Then kiss them on the forehead and let them go with an affectionate pat on the fanny.

Once you do that, your resistance to them will disappear and, as we have been told, that which we resist persists. Once your resistance to them is gone, their power over you will be gone also. The gnome may still be there, may still creep in when you least want to see them, but you will have already undone their special magic.

So look after your gnome!

(My eternal gratitude to Lawrence Ball for suggesting this wonderful image.)
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a24)

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Besides Weeping Willow, the book I wrote with Steve Mancini, I have written three novels (at least one of which should be published this year, a science fiction odyssey called Guardian Mosaic.) I am in the process of mapping out another one right now. While doing it, I am taking a sort of omniscient view of the process I’m using. Is my approach to novel writing different from that which I use to write short stories? What I am discovering is very interesting to me.

Yes, on the surface, I am approaching them differently. Novels are a different form and need different things: A novel is more sprawling than a short story. Although, like short stories, no two novels are the same and each has it’s own requirements, generally, a novel has more twists and turns, more sub-plots (often short stories don’t have sub-plots at all) and usually a novel will have more characters, so the interaction and relationships between characters requires more preparation. So in that sense the approach is different.

On a more fundamental level, however, I am realizing that I approach it in almost exactly the same way. Like with short stories, I start with an idea. I imagine myself through the setting and imagine the intricacies of the characters. Even though I don’t use as much detail in a short story, I imagine these things very thoroughly so that I know they are real for me, so that process is almost exactly the same besides there being more of them.

I then begin to design the beginning, middle and end. This step is more complex in a novel, because each character might need their own beginning, middle and end, and each section of the novel might need its own. However, I find I use the same techniques to do it for each. So it’s quite similar, just on a grander scale.

It is exciting to me to discover how similar the process that I use for both is. As I continue work on this novel, I will continue to look at the specifics of the process. Stay tuned.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

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I often talk about the need to get stuff done as opposed to getting it done perfectly. The whole, “do you want it perfect or do you want it on Tuesday” philosophy is an apt one. Besides the notion that perfect isn’t possible, it can drive one crazy when one tries to reach it. Okay, full disclosure. I am often, not always but often, such a one.

And it hath, as Hamlet said to Ophelia, made me mad. At least a little. I start out with all good intentions striving for excellence, but balancing that against the reality of getting something done and done on time. (As long as we are confessing things, I must tell you that as I get older “on time” has become a much more fluid a concept.)

The Internet has changed the way I do things. I used to slave over every detail until the project went out, then leave all mistakes in the hands of my betters. Now, I get something done, post it on whatever site it is being posted on, then obsess about it. Reread it. Tweak it. Worry over it. I have spent the last two days putting up a site for a project that a friend and I am doing which sells fine hand-crafted jewelry among other things. She is in charge of the jewelry and I’m in charge of writing and designing the site and the sales system. I obsessed about every detail (putting myself behind on the #blog30 challenge, speaking of confessions) and finally finished the site sometime yesterday. My friend, Laureen, loved it, but made a couple of suggestions. I added those. Now I have spent the entire day… the ENTIRE day, going back and fixing, tweaking, adjusting, doctoring, revamping, honing and making it generally but oh so subtly better.

I do the same thing when I write, or when Steve and I write. I reread it over and over after we’ve both decided it was done. When we used to post chapters to our on-line serial (that became our book, Weeping Willow) I would spend the entire evening rereading the chapter eight or ten times, often going back in and making “just one” tiny adjustment. Eight or ten times. Steve makes fun of me. Once it’s done, he is willing to declare it done. “Are you reading it again!?!” “Yes. Shut up.”

This stuff makes it better. Does it make it perfect? No. Does it mean I’m crazy? Probably.

I am obsessive. Is there something wrong with that?

I certainly hope not.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a1)

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If you are writing stories from your life, there are may reasons to fictionalize them, or at least fictionalize elements of them. I’m going to briefly focus on three:

1. For your benefit
2. For the benefit of the people you’re writing about
3. For the benefit of your reader

We’ll start with the most obvious, for benefit of the people you’re writing about.

For the People You’re Writing About

The old cliché from the television show Dragnet that ran from 1951 through 1959, “… the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Often, though, just changing the name might be insufficient. Consider: You are writing a story about an experience that your child had. If you simply change his or her name, but leave the locations, characteristics and circumstances the same, it will become very obvious to anyone who cares to look who the model was. The child will grow up and feel violated by the story. I rather doubt that a parent would want to make their child feel violated.

In this case, I recommend changing enough that the essence of the story is still there, but the particulars are imagined as if the entire thing were a fictional story you’re writing. If your child is named Bill, consider changing it to Janice. This will immediately remove the story from specifics that will embarrass the child.

If the person isn’t a child, some of the same things might apply.

For Your Readers

When you write something from your life, you are crammed with information about the incident or incidents. There are things that happened in real life at the same time that aren’t really directly related to the incident. There are steps that happened that are really inconsequential to it. It is very difficult to edit these things out because it feels like a violation of the truth and you are telling the story, after all, because it is the truth. (I realize the irony, but I say that by fictionalizing it, you are telling a bigger truth.)

By giving yourself fictional elements, you must then really look at what the point of the story is, what beginning, middle and end that would express that point and what people you need for that. It becomes much easier to edit a story that you aren’t as invested in. In reality, the third and fourth time your teacher screamed at you were as awful to experience as the first. For a reader, however, the first and second will probably be more than sufficient to get the point across and more than that might make their mind wander. (Don’t look at the numbers, here, look at the point itself. I know you wouldn’t be all rigorous on my math, but I must say that for my own sake.)

Here is where fictionalizing can be powerful for the reader.

For Yourself

The parody of the Dragnet quote is, “The names have been changed to protect the guilty.” This was funny through about the mid-sixties, but it is important, here. Besides the benefit for you of making it easier to edit, fictionalizing your story will make it much less likely that you will be sued, or, at the very least, harassed by someone you have exposed or profiled.

This is not a small thing.

As I said, this is a brief discussion of why fictionalizing a story from your life might be effective or wise. These are not rules. (You may have noticed that I don’t much like rules when it comes to creativity.) So forget everything I just said and go write your life.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a19)

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Many years ago, Steve had a subscription to Writer’s Digest magazine. In almost every issue, there were articles such as:

• “10 Writing Mistakes to Avoid”
• “The 5 Top Reasons an Agent Will Reject Your Book”
• “7 Query Don’ts”
• “Why You Won’t Sell Your Manuscript”
• “The Top 10 Things You’re Doing Wrong”
• “Why You Suck as a Writer”
• “100 Reasons to Just Give It All Up and Become an Accountant Like Your Mother Told You To”

Okay, so I’m exaggerating. A little. It got so that every time Steve opened the covers of the magazine, he felt more discouraged, until he almost quit writing. He canceled his subscription instead. Wise move.

(Full disclosure, Writer’s Digest has much in it that is useful and they gave us marvelous commentary on our book Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend – http://www.josephcoaler.com/testimonials.html)

Much advice to writers is in the “what not to do” arena. I say, tell me what I can do. Inspire me to create. Creativity is a magical, mercurial thing, please, when you give advice, honor that magic. Open up possibilities for me. And especially, Don’t Scare Me Away From Writing! Sheesh.

And if you are a writer, look for advisers who will do all that for you. They are out there. There are people who will excite you about what creativity can do, excite you about your own potential, who pull fetters off rather than strapping you in to them. Find people who open doors rather then telling you why the doors are closed. For goodness sake, find people who encourage you.

If you are creative, you are powerful and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. And we’re all creative.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a18)

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I had a life-changing exchange with a teacher, once. We were talking about pursuing our passions, our art. About spending our lives doing something we loved. I stood up in class and asked a question that had been burning in my heart for years: “What if I’m just not talented?”

He asked me, “What if you’re not?”

I thought about that for a moment. At first I got mad. How could he even suggest that? (I was young and logic didn’t enter in to it.) Then, as I considered more, I realized that it didn’t matter at all. And it hasn’t mattered ever since.

I’ve seen people who were truly talented who did nothing with their talent. I’ve seen people who had very little talent, but a lot of drive that sailed in their chosen profession. Over the few months after that conversation, I slowly removed that question from my mind. I did it by saying to myself that I had absolutely no talent, and that I was going to pursue art anyway. It eased a very heavy burden. A burden I’d been carrying a very long time.

I have worked hard over the years. I’ve developed my eye, my ear, my sensibilities. I’ve listened to words and read words and put words together. I’ve experimented and discovered what worked, what was effective, what wasn’t as effective. My love of words was more than enough to keep me moving forward and by moving forward, my love of words and their power and beauty grew. I have been told, by some who seem to know what they’re talking about, that I’m a good writer. If that is true, it’s not because I’m talented, or, if I am talented, because I’m more so than anyone else might be. Talent has little or nothing to do with the ability to combine words in such a way that they evoke a response.

I can use words well because I dream and I follow where my dreams lead.

The rest is just a lot of words.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a17)

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Can learning the techniques of fiction and creative writing enhance other types of writing? When we study creative writing, we learn how to structure stories, how to communicate their ideas. We learn how to evoke emotions, how to build characters and relationships between characters.

Let’s look to see how any of these skills might go well with other types of writing:

Sales Copy: The easiest way to build enough rapport with your customers is to tell them who you are, why you’ve created the product and tell stories about people who have needed and/or used the product. Knowing any of the fundamentals of creative writing listed above will make this task much easier.

Academic Writing: Much academic writing presents research and its conclusions to a limited audience, most of whom have at least some understanding of the arcane aspects of the subject at hand. Using visceral descriptions and observations can bring obscure facts alive, therefore give conclusions more power.

Business Writing: Unlike academic writing, business writing often has a broader audience, an audience that may not have knowledge of the matter at hand. It is often considered necessarily dry, more so in order to give details to an audience that doesn’t understand the subject. How much more powerful would it be to the end reader to read a report that told the story of the matter rather than one that coldly listed facts?

Technical Writing: Here we may run into a road block. Technical writing requires the writer to describe technology and processes in a clear cut way so that others who wish to use the technology or run the processes will know what they are doing. There is an assumption by the writer of knowledge in the reader in the area of what is being explained and therefore a list of procedures and/or explanations of detail seem sufficient. Again, though, how much easier on the reader, no matter how much prior knowledge they have of the subject, if the detail is presented as a story that can be followed about how the relationships between the technicalities grow?

So, can creative techniques enhance other types of writing? Yes.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a14)

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I often talk about writer’s myths, things people think of as writing rules that often just get in the way of good writing. Are their any rules for writing that the writer should be aware of? Certainly. One such rule is, “don’t use sentence fragments”. An example of a sentence fragment, for those who missed the inherent irony, is “Certainly.”

Proper use of grammar is important. Knowing when to use “he” and when to use “him”, for instance: Is it “I went to the store with he and Irene” or “I went to the store with him and Phyllis.” In this case, the easiest way to know which to use is to cut the “and” phrase from the sentence and see which one works. “I went to the store with he” is obviously wrong, so the second example is the correct one. (Unless you actually went to the store with her and Gregory, in which case the sale meat you purchased is probably tainted.)

However, there are times when you might do exactly that for effect. (A subtle effect, to be sure, as most in America would probably miss it.) One way to break it is in dialogue where, depending on the character talking, most grammar rules can simply be thrown out the window. Real people, when they talk, often don’t know and therefore don’t use, proper grammar. To make the dialogue true to the character, write as he or she would talk. (Him or her? No. He or she.)

You’ve heard not to start a sentence with “and” or “but”. Many great writers do. You’ve heard that you shouldn’t split an infinitive (put any word between “to” and the verb.) That rule only came into existence at the beginning of the 19th century because some priggish professors wanted English to sound more like Latin, which it never will, so to simply ignore that rule is to boldly go where good writers have gone before.

Knowing the rules of proper grammar is important and every writer should strive to learn them, if only because you can then you can break them much more effectively.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a13)

All artists have exercises to help them with the craft of their art. Painters and sculpters are always sketching. Musicians do scales and are always plinking and plunking and tinkling on something. Dancers do their bar work. Singes do vocal warmups.

An exercise we recommend for writers is to sit down, look at something in your immediate environment or out the window and write down what you see. Write it in detail that you would never include in a story. Use as many of your senses as you can. It is a very good way to flex your observation muscles and your facility with words, with evoking an experience. And you never know, you may end up using a lot of them in some form in your writing.

When I was taking care of my mother in her cabin in Northern Idaho, everything was new and different for me. I didn’t have much to do most of the day, so I started describing the things in her living room, the hummingbirds drinking out of the red, red feeder right outside the window, the way the shadows of the clouds rolled over the green fields of the valley beyond. I described the yellow flowers on the hill behind the cabin. I described a wonderful thunder and lightning storm that I watched travel toward us from a long way off one bright night.

These exercises, done over weeks, became an integral part of one of the plots of my novel Guardian Mosaic.

When I got back home, I was still in the habit of observing and writing what I saw in my immediate surroundings. I described my own tiny living room with new eyes, having not seen it for several months. This became part of what I consider to be the best thing I’ve ever written, a surreal prose poem about my mother’s death called A Journey Home.

Even if you never use the actual descriptions, it’s a wonderful, rich thing to do. And you’ll never know if there’s something there to eventually use if you don’t try!
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

(@conniegreen #blog30 a1)

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