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If there's one thing that I've learned in life, it's that sometimes it pays to cheat. And before you get any sneaky ideas about your tax returns, let me explain...
Think back to your childhood: Back to a time when Uncle Frankie could pull his index finger apart and wiggle the severed end. Back to a time when the adults would chuckle when you struggled to figure out the complexities of the world. Back to a time when you were just learning that certain rules were still open to interpretation.
One of the adults gives you a scrambled Rubik's Cube and explains that all of the stickers on each side need to match colors. They think, this ought to keep you quiet. And it does...for a while. You leave the room and peel off the stickers and replace them in their correct location. Now you can watch all of the adults, including Uncle Frankie, wonder how in the world you were able to solve the Rubik's Cube so fast...and at your age!
It's a wonderful thing to have the freedom and creativity of a child. I try to take those childhood eyes and focus them on my writing process. With all of the rigors of trying to get a story edited just so, it helps to exercise some freedom without boundaries.
One excellent way to do this is to write in a journal or do prompt exercises. You don't have to share this with anyone...ever. You can write anything you like without having to worry about what you come up with. When it comes to grammar or punctuation, it doesn't matter. It won't be perfect, but so what? Cheat. It's about tapping into that childhood creativity.
All writers have an inner critic like that adult hovering the child's shoulder saying, "No, that's not the right way to do it." Your challenge as a writer is to go into another room where nobody else is looking and become that child. You may discover something surprising and wonder, how in the world did I come up with that?
I love analogies. Surprising, huh? Especially since this blog is just one big analogy. But as I've learned, writing a story takes more than simply stringing together a long list of witty analogies like popcorn garland. (Yes, pun intended).
As a beginner in any endeavor, we will make fundamental mistakes. We tend to focus on the wrong things. I remember when I got my first Rubik's Cube. I was so excited when I was able to solve a colored side. On a few very rare occasions, I was even able to get two sides, usually opposites. But I could never get the whole thing without cheating.
I wouldn't understand until years later that my whole approach was flawed. To solve the Cube, it's a mistake to focus on just the stickers for the side you're solving. In fact, every sticker is connected to other stickers. Once you know that the sticker you want to move has other stickers also belonging to the same little cubie, like Siamese siblings, finding a solution becomes much easier.
When I write, I try to Forget About the Stickers. It's a mistake to simply focus on the prose. That would be fine for poetry, but readers of fiction don't always appreciate the literary quality of a piece of fiction. They want a story. And the words are connected to other things in the story, just like the stickers on the Cube. If those other things, like character, conflict, theme, are not there then the story will be fundamentally flawed.
It's fine to have analogies in a story, but they should be chosen carefully. I know how proud I feel when I come up with a great analogy, but if it doesn't fit with the other elements of the story, then maybe it's not so great after all...at least for that particular story.
So, forget about the stickers, look at all of the connections. This will help you to chose which stickers you want to work with and which ones simply come along for a ride.
