Word After Word

Two things. It’s much easier to write about two things than one thing. If you write about two things, you can make gaps and metaphors. Rub two topics against each other on one page and you create fire.

Beginning writers often worry they don’t have anything to write about while tending to forbid themselves from writing about what made them want to be writers in the first place. They want to wait until they are good enough, skilled so they don’t wreck up their best material. Wreck it up.

Here’s how. Take a thing you want to write about but you can’t write about it (too personal, too hurtful to others, the guilty aren’t dead, too boring) (and realize what’s holding you back may be unconscious, as may the topics themselves!). Put this sparky thing with a simple thing, like a typical dinner in your childhood home or rain. Stitch back and forth: write little bits about each thing, alternating short lines or passages or paragraphs or scenes.  Soon you’ll see if you have something. It will show up in the gaps. (If you are just starting out, show the piece to someone who is a really good reader and not related to you. A teacher.)

Writing about two things, always, instead of one thing will amplify your ideas, tease out your internal wisdom, giving your work depth and dimension and architectural interest.

This is another way of approaching The Gaps (see blog entry below). Steer towards the gaps—anything that has a gap in it. You apologized but you weren’t sorry. You saw it but we all pretended you didn’t.