Posted on 08/17/2006 8:36:45 PM PDT by Number57
Or you can do what I do and simply put one word after another in a sort of free association thingy wherein the kitten who got trapped in the toilet managed to bleat plaitively enough for its voice to be heard by an itinerant tinker whose heart echoed its distress. Carefully he climbed up the trellis and stepped through the open window. Then the homeowner shot him and went back to bed. The kitten drowned.
I wouldn't try sending that one to an agent in a query letter...
Yeah. Got it.
"The night was humid..."
Is that a formal challenge?
I once won second place in an international writing competition. :-)
Bookmarked for a later look see. I have dial-up.
Well, this will either help or reveal me as a nutball, but I 'see' everything like a movie, then just write down what I see and hear. The only time I've been stuck is when 'I' get in the way of the story and try to put things in that I want to see happen. The best dialog has also been the stuff I've just heard. People talk to me in the shower-lol!
Someone further up also had good advice- write the end first. I co-wrote my first novel was done that way. We saw the beginning and the end and all we had to do was figure out how I could logically get from one point to the other.
It's also nice when things just write themselves, coming so quickly and smoothly that its like taking dictation. I've heard people say that art, like writing and music etc, comes THROUGH us not from us. In at least one case I can tell you that that is true.
Good luck. Back away. Try another perspective- and listen.
Mkay.
Have a big metorite suddenly wipe out the Earth. That should wrap things up nicely for you.
I once won second place in an international writing competition. :-)
I once placed first in an x-treme writing competition. During the competition, the contestants got drunk and beat on each other with old IBM Selectrics. The competition ended in a Cage Match where the two finalists beat an agent to a bloody pulp with chairs from the Four Seasons.
Fart?
I read that one years ago and never came across it again. Too funny. Thanks for posting it.
Oops...meteorite.
Here's the entire text of Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech.
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
But THE most important thing you can do, is to NOT EVER POST GARBAGE, BANAL VANITIES TO FR ANYMORE AND MOST ESPECIALLY NOT TO THE NEWS SECTION!
Ping
FWIW, it took me two months to write 500 words. I got a dollar a word as the prize. Whoppee!. Actually the hard part was getting the story down below 500 words. My first draft was about 1200 words. Amazingly the story sounded better and better as I cut out superfluous words and narrowed the focus of the story. When I was done it was EXACTLY 500 words. The winning story was over 500 words, ab out 530 words to be exact. I found out later that the rule for "500 words or less" was "flexible".
If, after 20 years, this is the best you can do, burn it and never try to write anything ever again. I've read better stories written by a 12 year old.
Write something in non-fiction, something with a message, a point to share with others, on a topic important to you. Fiction is either there --start & finish, you fill in the middle-- or you need to write non-fiction. If you play a musical instrument, dive into playing music. [BTW, are you actually Luis Gonzalez? If you are, FINISH THAT CUBAN NOVEL, Luis. I wanna read it all before I die!]
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.