Other Than Fiction

Most of us write every day, but we writers tend not to count things other than fiction as writing. Writing for us = story. I admit, I'm guilty of that mindset.

I'm writing this blog post now. After it I have a couple of e-mails to answer, notes to type up for my novel notebook, and then my daily wordcount quota to nail. If I have time, I'll add an entry in my private journal. I don't text -- no smart phone -- but I will jot down a few more tasks on my to-do list. I also have to update the calendar for March with some upcoming events. After I finish my daily edit tonight, I'll probably work on some character sheets and a synopsis in progress.

The truth is most of us write constantly. We pour words into our phones and computers, and scrawl them on our notepads, grocery lists and chalkboards. Some of it may even be fiction, but it's all writing. Everything we write is an opportunity to be creative, too.

Now I feel your skepticism, so let me give you a couple of examples:

Regular e-mail: Sorry, I can't make it tonight. I've got a migraine.

Creative e-mail: Forgive me for not making it tonight. A balloon T-Rex is using a titanium sledgehammer to play Some Like It Hot on the inside of my skull.

They both say the same thing, but the second e-mail is wry and funny. It communicates the same information, but it also pokes a little fun at it. The recipient gets a smile out of the no-show notice. Meanwhile, you're exercising your imagination, never a bad thing.

Taking a little extra effort to be creative with your other-than-fiction writing provides additional benefits. Routine and boring suddenly becomes unique and clever. Sometimes I laugh out loud at the market after I read off a creative entry on my shopping list:

Rebecca Romainehead
Bananarama (4)
Truvia Pursuit
Don't go down the candy aisle
Seed for damn squirrels to steal
Handy Dandy Wipes
No, don't go down the candy aisle. Keeping walking.
Bacchus's favorite snack
Flour au naturale
Brutus's Squeeze
I am Ginger Root
You can't eat candy, you ditz.

It's fun inventing new names for things I need from the market (for those of you who aren't Popeye fans, Brutus's Squeeze = olive oil). It livens up a pretty boring chore, too. More than anything, it's writing practice. I constantly have to think up new ways to describe things in the stories I work on; I think writing a shopping list this way helps me keep my imagination limber and nimble.

Other ways you can practice your creative skills while writing things other than fiction:

If you have a chalkboard or whiteboard in your home, start writing a thought for the day on it.

Put funny or encouraging notes in your kids' lunchboxes.

Buy blank cards and personalize them for every occasion with a hand-written message.

Label storage containers creatively, i.e. Future Blackmail (kids' pictures or schoolwork), Not Lost Library (old manuscripts), and When I Feel Wretched Reads (keeper books).

Take an old white t-shirt (you can buy them cheap at Goodwill) and every day write in indelible ink a meaningful-to-you word or phrase on it. To prevent bleed-through, first place a piece of sturdy cardboard under the area where you want to write. When the t-shirt is completely covered, wash and wear it.

What are some of the ways you get creative with writing other than fiction? Give us some tips in comments.

Discovering by Doing

Last month I started working on this crazy quilted tote with no particular purpose in mind. Almost everything else I'd worked on in 2013 was for gifts or promo purposes, and I wanted to do something for stitching practice. Projects like these allow me to try new ideas, too.

When I make practice projects I always use scraps and leftover floss and beads so I don't waste materials. I also try to use up supplies I don't particularly like for whatever reason (this bag got stuck with a length of velvet ribbon and a swatch of faux-silk cotton, both in bright Barbie/Pepto Bismol pink.) My logic for using unwanted bits is that if I completely screw it up I can toss it in the scrap bin without any tears.

I made some poor choices with this bag from the start: the blinding white canvas handles (neutral would have been better), two Victorian novelty prints I considered interesting (actually too busy) and a butterfly I cobbled together from an organza floral accent piece and a rhinestone earring (it looked so great in my head, but after the execution? Not so much.) I'm also a little allergic to sequins, so discovering the semi-transparent type already sewn on my silk flower and my butterfly base annoyed me. I admit, I was a bit all over the place with the color palette, too.

Despite this, I worked on this bag every night for four weeks. I didn't like it, I was already mad at myself for some of the decisions I'd made, but I also suspected I could learn something from it. I've been experimenting for a couple of years now with mixing crystals, pearls, satin ribbons and lace for embellishment. Lately I have this running pink/gold/antique white/gray theme that usually works out well, and I decided to go with some variations on the bag.

I was fairly happy with some of what I did on the front of the bag, but a satin ribbon I wanted to use for the back turned out to have a bunch of pin marks and puckers in it. Beading it the way I had planned would showcase every blemish. I also had a slightly tattered ivory cotton eyelet ribbon I'd meant to pair with the mangled ribbon, but once I pinned it in place I could see that my pearls and crystals would look a little silly edging the many large flower-shaped spaces in it.

I sewed and ripped and beaded and snipped as I tried several things I've done in the past, but none of them really worked with the ribbon or the lace. Right as I was about to toss it in the scrap bin I decided to let go of what I expected and wanted and instead try something entirely new. I sewed different-colored pearls in the eyelet spaces of the lace, and then embroidered and beaded over the mangled ribbon with contrasting beads and floss. As I was working on it I was almost 100% sure it would end up looking like crap, but what the heck. Nothing ventured, right?



Of all the work I did on the bag, the make-do/try something new sections with the lace and ribbon you see here turned out to be the best-looking of my handwork. They finished so well you might think that I'd planned it all that way from the start with brand-new materials.

We can talk about our work, and study techniques, and read piles of books about it (you don't want to know how many books on quilting and embellishment that I've read.) Having discussions as well as studying how to be better at what we do are great, and we should do as much of that as we can. That said, sometimes the only way to discover what you can do is to simply do it and keep doing it until you figure it out or you work it out or it just happens. We all know that practice really doesn't make anything perfect, but it can give you the time, space and challenges you need in order to make new discoveries about your work -- and yourself.

What have you learned to do better simply by doing it? Let us know in comments.

Experiment with Your Fiction

Over the holidays a friend gave me a copy of Sexton Burke's The Writer's Lab, a guided writing practice book in which every page challenges you to create on demand. Don't be fooled by the mad scientist-styled cover art, either; this is a seriously amazing vault of excellent writing exercises.

The author devotes only a single preface page to explaining how to use the book before diving into the challenges, which range all over the place, from creating an autobiographical haiku to writing James Bond as if the character was a woman. You also get to practices writing things like killing off a character from your favorite book, finding love-worthy qualities about the person who most makes you miserable, and imagining what the pilots and passengers of a plane about to crash would do in the last fifty seconds before impact.

I liked everything about this book: the black-and-white minimalist design of the pages, the imaginative quality of the exercises, and the many ways in which the author pushes you to practice not only the art but the more difficult aspects of it. This one is going with me on my road trip, and I expect I'll be filling up the pages in no time. Definitely recommended for any writer who enjoys challenges, wants to improve their craft and have fun in the process.

Character Journals

The University of Chicago is blogging about a very neat journal mystery:

Yesterday we received a package addressed to “Henry Walton Jones, Jr.”. We sort-of shrugged it off and put it in our bin of mail for student workers to sort and deliver to the right faculty member— we get the wrong mail a lot. Little did we know what we were looking at. When our student mail worker snapped out of his finals-tired haze and realized who Dr. Jones was, we were sort of in luck: this package wasn’t meant for a random professor in the Stat department. It is addressed to “Indiana” Jones.

This included a handwritten journal penned by Abner Ravenwood, the father of Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark (and you can read more about the mystery and details of what else came in the package at UChicago's Admissions tumblr blog here.) That someone would go to all the trouble of creating a journalistic homage to a fictitious character doesn't surprise me; writers do it all the time. That they mailed it off to a real university is part of the mystery, as in the film the college Indy worked at was completely invented. My guess is the creator might have once been a UChicago student -- and (obviously) a huge fan of the Indiana Jones movie franchise.

Creating a character journal is much like keeping one of your own; the difference is that you write in character, as this enterprising soul did as Abner Ravenwood. Your dates are your character's timeline, either in backstory or the present (you might even want to explore their future by journal), and any photos, sketches or other visual additions should be character- and story-appropriate.

This kind of journaling can be fun, but it's also serious practice with POV. When you write as your character you have to see things through their eyes, and it can help you understand their thoughts and responses. Before I wrote Evermore I created a poetry journal and a sketchbook for Jayr, my female protagonist, so I could work out her feelings for Aedan mac Byrne, the male protagonist. The project became part of the story, inspired the title of the novel and some of the poetry I wrote in character is actually published in the book, so it was not only immensely helpful, it actually became part of the story.

If you don't want to commit to a project as sizeable as a journal, try writing a letter or a blog post in character. The more time you spend in your character's POV, the better you'll get to know how they think, and like me you may even come up with some fun and valuable story material.

Roll With It

My guy could never be a vampire; he loves garlic too much. One of his favorite things in the world are those lovely knotted rolls you get at good Italian restaurants. He especially likes the rolls at one local place, which they serve drizzled with olive oil and topped off with chopped raw garlic.

Because I like making my guy happy, I've been trying for years to find the equivalent of those rolls that I could make at home with my Italian meals. I've tried jazzing up my own rolls, rolls from the bakery and frozen garlic knots (which are pretty awful no matter what you do with them) but no luck. Nothing tasted as hot, fresh or light as the rolls from his favorite restaurant.

I don't give up that easy; I'm the daughter of a chef, and while I'm never going to win a bake-off I'm a pretty decent bread maker. I felt certain I could figure out the recipe, I thought, by experimenting until I got it right.

I knew by taste that the rolls were made with yeast, so my first attempts were all variations on yeast roll recipes from various cookbooks. Some were too dense, some were too sweet, and none of them had the right texture. The dough needed to be light but chewy, almost like a good bagel, so I moved on to bagel dough recipes. That didn't work. I then tried to make them based on recipes for Italian bread, homemade pretzels and even my mother's fried dough cakes, but no luck there, either.

I was close to driving myself crazy over these rolls when I thought of something: the restaurant that made my guy's favorite garlic rolls also did a big business in take-out pizza. A lot of pizza meant a lot of dough -- and good pizza crust is made with yeast. If they wanted to save time, they'd probably use some of their pizza dough for their rolls instead of another, different recipe.

It seemed almost too stupid to be right, but I was pretty sure I was onto something, so I made a batch of my homemade pizza dough, cut it into strips, rolled it into knots, and baked them. They came out so close to the restaurant's rolls that after one bite I nearly fell on the floor. They were using pizza dough. Despite my success the rolls still weren't quite right; they didn't have that correct crispness to the crust, and the garlic in my olive oil drizzle seemed mushy.

I talked about the recipe with my daughter, who took a culinary class in school last year, and she suggested I use an egg wash on the rolls to improve the crust (and that worked.) Then I tried different ways to prepare and add the chopped garlic, all of which failed to replicate the restaurant's version. It ended up being too chunky, too soggy, too crunchy or too mushy. I was too close to give up, so by trial and error I discovered that if I waited to chop the garlic (in the food processor) a minute before the rolls were finished baking, and added it to the rolls after applying the olive oil drizzle, it worked.

Now my guy can have his favorite rolls whenever he likes, no restaurant required. I know it seems like a silly thing to spend so much time puzzling out, but you don't know how happy these rolls make my man. He practically kisses my feet every time I set a basket of them on the table.

Of course, I could have saved myself a year of trial and error baking by asking one of the people at the restaurant to tell me how they make their rolls; we're such regular customers I'm pretty sure they would have given me at least the general idea. Or I might have searched online until I found the exact right recipe for garlic knots and copied that. There's nothing wrong with either of those options; they certainly would have eliminated a lot of mistakes and failed batches of rolls.

That also would have taken all the fun out of it, and I wouldn't have learned things like egg wash is great for making crisper crust on bread (thank you, daughter), or that garlic is better chopped than crushed. Even while taste-testing different types of garlic while I was involved in this experiment, I found out that Mexican-grown variety is a little too bitter for my taste, and the elephant variety (which has huge cloves) is kind of bland.

It's also given me an infusion of assurance that I didn't have before; I really don't have my Dad's gift with food so I've always been more of a by-the-book cook. I've adapted existing recipes, but I've never invented one from scratch on my own. Now that I've done this, I think I'll be open to experimenting more often.

There's one more bonus I got out of this cooking experiment: I'll never tell my guy this, but I like my garlic knots better than the ones we get at the restaurant. This is because I know exactly what goes into them, my ingredients are all-natural and healthy, and they're made with love. How can any restaurant top that?

With writing, most everyone develops their own creative process based on what they're taught, what they read in books and what they imitate. None of these are wrong; whatever helps you to learn and improve your art is a good thing. But every now and then, it doesn't hurt to figure it out on your own. It may take longer, and you may fail several times, but you'll also learn, and eventually you will find the way to make it work. And that will be your way, not someone else's, and that will instill a sense of confidence that no teacher or book can ever give you.