Write to create

Most weeks at the Abu Dhabi Writers' Workshop, we include some discussion of motivational issues: things like how to start writing or how to get back to a project that has stalled. So, this week we discussed the kick start ideas from an article by Shaunta Grimes, 'How tiny goals changed my life.' Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day but he is, after all, a full-time writer, while you are holding down a full-time job or managing a family (or maybe both). So, take Shaunta's advice, set minute goals and take it from there.

In an activity designed to help us add detail to our writing, we re-wrote a page from Charles Frazier's book Cold Mountain (Hodder and Stoughton, 1997), thus producing as many different slants and moods to the story as we had writers in the workshop .

This led us to consider the dangers of 'overwriting,' and shoddy or careless writing (aka bad writing). There are plenty of published examples of both. We looked at two of these. Remember, you aren't done with your writing until you've edited and re-written it.

In British primary schools children are being encouraged to add 'wow-words' to their writing, namely 'exotic' words - usually adjectives - that are meant to lend impact. In 'De-wowing wow-words,' author Anne Rooney writing in The Author (Summer 2016) observes: 'It's not clever to use an unusual word. It's clever to use ordinary words in a new way.'

Commenting on the work of playwright Samuel Beckett, screenwriter Laurence Marks praises the 'virtue of succinctness.' We must, he says, 'learn to cut like Beckett,' and points out that 'it isn't the quantity but the quality that in the end matters.'

Writing brings great satisfaction, but it is also hard work as author James M. Cain explains in this rather brutal quote:

"A novel is something that has to be endured by the writer. Anybody who can't go back for the fourteenth and fifteenth revision with freshness and enthusiasm ought to get out of the business."

So, this week, beat tedium in your writing by avoiding cliche and mixed metaphors, and by trying to use ordinary words in a new way.

Keep writing!