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Category: fiction
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Starter . . . from an advertisement!
Today, I’m going to give you an opening line. Then, if you really want to know where it came from, follow the dots down the page. It may give you an ADDITIONAL idea to write about! The line is… She’s first. * * * * * * * * * * * These…
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Sara Dailey #007: Circle technique
Ok, so it’s our final day of looking at Sara Dailey’s technique via her creative nonfiction piece, “The Memory Train.” Today it’s all about circle technique. If you look back to the first post of this week, you’ll see she began with a paragraph about Phineas Gage, a railway worker who LIVED after accidentally…
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Sara Dailey #006: Character foils–another interesting contrast for your writing
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Character foils are two characters in the same situation who react differently. Picture two kids with an alcoholic parent. One grows up and never touches a drop of alcohol. The other becomes alcoholic. Those are foils, and they’re another way to show contrast, just like the rhetorical questions we explored yesterday. Let’s see…
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Sara Dailey #005: Rhetorical questions and contrast
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I know what you’re thinking…POWER PUNCH? For a rhetorical question? Are you kidding me? But rhetorical questions are powerful because they automatically imply a CONTRAST and contrast is what makes writing interesting. What I mean is that there are usually two opposite ways of answering a question, so conflict is naturally indicated this…
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Sara Dailey #004: Hard and soft similes
I was always taught that similes are gentler than metaphors. You know–use simile in a Valentine’s Day card to your girlfriend; use metaphor for your angstiest emo poetry. Clearly, Sara Dailey didn’t get that lesson. First, look at the hard-hitting simile she works into her story, “The Memory Train”: Like the soul, a migraine…
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Sara Dailey week #003: Knockout idea–Use a theme!
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9 Now you know that if this idea is stated in the Bible, a book that’s a few thousand years old, then it’s not exactly a new idea that writers struggle…
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Sara Dailey week #002: Character and pathos
In “The Memory Train,” Sara Dailey begins by describing a man, Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived after a large iron rod punctured his left frontal lobe. The bleached bone shows a jagged U above the empty hollow of the left eye’s socket, bone that never again seamlessly met other bone. It…
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Sara Dailey Week #001: Starter from a title
Welcome to Sara Dailey week! Over the next seven days, we’ll be learning technique and getting ideas from a single article of hers, “The Memory Train,” that was published in Creative Nonfiction magazine, the one edited by Lee Gutkind. First up is taking a look at that title: “The Memory Train.” Other people’s…
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Knockout Idea: Photo captions
Here’s a knockout idea I got while reading Ariel Levy’s story, “Living Room Leopards.” At the very beginning of the story, there was a photo of a cross-bred cat: a mix between a wildcat and a domestic cat. The caption read: Half-bred crossbreeds are in vogue but controversial, and illegal in some states. …
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Speed bag drill #002: Mysterious deaths
So speed bags work this way: Once you finish reading the prompt, you start moving your pen on paper or you flash those fingers across your keyboard, and you keep going for at least five minutes. Today’s speed drill comes from “Findings,” in the June 2013 edition of Harper’s: Experts were unable to explain the…