Here's a quick and easy and online (though it's live, so time zones can be an obstacle) little view into writing fiction. There's not time for much, but it's a fun way to kick off your fall writing.

Sept. 7, 6-8pm (Central US Time Zone)

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This month's imprompt2 is about conversations again--about how a story is always in conversation with the larger world. (I didn't write this one, except a tiny little bit at the end, but I think it's excellent and it's about one of my favorite things to think about.)

How does your writing interact with (or refuse to acknowledge) all the baggage a reader brings from the outside world?

https://bit.ly/NavLearnEx

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@allisonwyss

I use the characters themselves to convey this: their literal voices (loud, low, etc.), their personalities (reserved, goofy, style of humor, etc.), their body language, & this last one especially—the dynamic of the interaction between characters; e.g., how A & B say & hear vs B & D. I have a keen sense of how my people look, sound, & move. Inflection isn't necessarily easy but it flows directly from this.

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Something must have been off with my connection the past few days--I thought everybody hated my question--but it turned out I just couldn't see the replies. Hope I'm not too late now that I see them!

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In my subtext class, we talk about inflection--how meaning changes based on _how_ words are said. This seems pretty obvious & I think about how we do it in real life & how actors do it. But then there's a moment of--wait!--how do we make inflection felt in writing?

So: Just describing it, of course. Emphasis through rhythm & punctuation choices. Gesture. What else?

How do you play with inflection in your dialogue?

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@allisonwyss

A recently written sentence that I enjoyed, and which required a few minor revisions (by reading it aloud) is in this post.

The sentence is after this one: "April rolls its little showers of rain to May, May brings the days to June."

I wanted a sentence that would then expand on the passage of time from April to June and evoke a simple, early-18th century rural life.

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@allisonwyss

One of the most impressive sentences that I've read was crafted by Joan Didion for her 1966 essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”.

Some expressions in the sentence show its age, but the build from the banal topics of the opening phrases is so good that the sentence is a short story and character study in itself.

I'll also post one of my own shortly.

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For this one I wrote about Nightbitch (by Rachel Yoder) and sensibility. But I also let myself geek about this long and luxurious sentence that piles up imagery for days.

Come across any lovely sentences lately? (Definitely count the ones you write yourself!)

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https://bit.ly/NightbitchDualSens

I wrote about how fairy tales are conversation & collaboration (& also multi-verse). I think fairy tales make it obvious, but I also think all storytelling is this way. We're always sharing tools & ideas & frameworks.

How much do you think about your story's dependencies on other stories, other writers, and eventual readers? Do you leave openings for other people to talk back?

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https://imprompt2.substack.com/p/fairy-tales-as-multiverse

And yet!

Another thing I like to talk about is how you can use a body inside a story to inspire physical sensation in the reader. Which might break the scene a bit as the read shudders themself write back into their living room (sometimes, not always), but it also puts the story itself into the real world. Where it can work some other kinds of magic.

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The panel was more about content than craft, tbh. But another reason I'm so into bodies on the page is they create dimension in a scene. There's this dynamic three-dimensional _someone_ moving through a space. And that aspect invites the reader to feel a scene as a space too. (Instead of just that string of one-word-at-at-a-time).

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I was on this panel about bodies & writing about them (I absolutely write about weird bodies!) and so we were talking about how a scene can often twist the chronic into the acute so it can be better comprehended. That's the same maybe with a body's function in a scene. This is a rambling thought.

But maybe, maybe, maybe, folks are interested in talking about how they use bodies (weird or less so) in their fiction?

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I love that we're all spread across the planet--but at least some of you are in my general part of the world? I think? (Minneapolis)

If that's you, come to Wordplay on Saturday! I'll be on a panel about bodies at 10:30am, talking to Said Shaiye, and moderated by Kate Vogl. I know it will be good. And then I'm going to stick around to watch some truly fabulous later events.

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I always have a very specific reason for readings I assign--a craft element or something else I want to talk about. But I usually start with a really open-ended "so what do you think?" And then we drill down into WHAT YOU THINK.

I call it interrogating your taste. It's good to notice what you like & dislike--& figure out why--so you can just decide what you want to write. Then, you know, you study how to do it.

So what do you think?

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This craft column is about Susy Yang's WHITE IVY and a whole lot of tools to make physical description alive and vibrant and even important to the story.

What are your favorite techniques for physical description of characters? And what makes you like a physical description when you read?

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https://bit.ly/WhIvyPhysDes

I always used to let my kid draw in her books (not library books). I did it because I wanted her to love them & engage with them & also--to be perfectly honest--it seemed too big a fight to stop her. But now I think it was a good start to reading critically and just _thinking_ about what she takes in. It was an early way to talk back to authority. Loving books is great--but they are not infallible gods--we must also question them.

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So when we study how to do that we're tempted to find simple solutions. I think the simplistic tricks and hacks and formulas are actually really useful to get things started--but hopefully it grows into something much more meaningful, that can't be pinned down so easily.

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I've been reflecting on some (amazing!) conversations here. I think we often get reductive in the way we talk about writing because what we're trying to say what is actually too complex to say another way. We're supposed to stumble a bit as we talk about stories and how we create them. We're crafting an experience that just can't be simplified into a few words.

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It's not that I don't think a writer should ever have to hear anything negative about their work--that would be absurd. But I think that when we send readers looking for faults, it often ends up with them saying "I want, I want, I want"--and taking over the story. I look for methods of feedback that center the writer's intentions and help make it more the writer's idea of the story--not this one random reader's.

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I also just like to ask:

Where is the heat in the story?

and

So how does this story move?

Those tend to evoke analysis that is useful without being judgmental.

And I also like that they focus on what a story does right now instead of pushing readers to imagine what it _could_ do in the future. It's the writer's job to imagine the next draft--not the reader's.

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