JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #62
July 29, 2021
I was going to put off writing this one for a while, but I’m writing this rumination last minute and I’ve got no other ideas, so I’ll go ahead with this. I saw yesterday that Kristine posted the writing prompt that spurred my thoughts here, so I want to acknowledge that and suggest everyone check out that writing prompt and try to write something with it. It’s a good exercise.
When approaching a writing prompt, sometimes it might be a good idea to find out what the prompt is trying to teach you. This can help focus how you approach it as an exercise. The general purpose of a writing prompt is to trick you into writing something, since we’re very busy and for some reason we try not to write even though we profess a love for writing. So, trying out writing prompts can help us produce something when otherwise we would have produced nothing, and every once in a while something really cool might sneak out of the exercise.
I remember John Gardner offering a couple of writing prompts in the back of one of his books that were something like, write a passage of short sentences that don’t call attention to themselves; and, write a genuine three-page sentence. On our podcast, Kristine has a couple of times talked about an assignment in which she had to try out various sentence structures. And at the workshop the other day, someone submitted a story generated from a prompt to write using only single-syllable words. I could invent other prompts based on this format: write exclusively in the active voice; avoid adjectives and adverbs; try to stick to specific nouns and verbs. You get the point. Writing poetry to a form (Haiku, Sonnet, Villanelle, etc.) works in a similar way.
You’ll notice that all of these prompts (maybe "exercises" is a better word) address the style of writing. They are meant to get the writer to think specifically about some aspect of style (or voice) and try to adjust their natural tendencies, to write more consciously, thinking about every word or the structure of every clause as they compose. I think that the point is not to get us to try writing in single-syllable words or eschew adverbs or see if we can write a legitimately long sentence--the point is to get us to think about and consider every word that comes to mind as we’re writing, to roll it around in our thoughts for a second or two, and make a conscious, deliberate decision about whether it is the right word to put down on the page.
Our capacity for language is largely unconscious. We have no introspective access to the mental processes that generate the sentences we speak, or that interpret what we hear from other people. Rather, we hear someone speak, and we make sense of it without noticing how much work goes into decoding the auditory stream. In ordinary speech, words spill out of our mouths or pop into our consciousness, bubbling up out of mental processes we cannot introspect. When we vomit these words onto paper, we’re not truly "writing" in the sense of deliberately composing a fictive experience. So it is that writing prompts and exercises such as those above are designed to trick us into the habit of considering our choices as we write, to not blindly accept what springs out of our subconscious.
Other genres of writing prompt are meant to get us to practice other kinds of skills. We don’t necessarily need to know what skills those are in order to try out the prompt, but it helps. I once read a piece of advice years ago that we should use every new writing project to practice a specific writing skill. In that way, everything we write can be based on a prompt that we ourselves provide.