writing tips

Trinton Spencer

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Tom Clancy

When people typically read a story, they tend to connect with the characters or the story’s world. These connections are not simply enjoying the world or having a favorite character but connecting the fantasy to the readers’ reality. So now, the character the readers love may stem from their background and their relationships with the real world and its people. Although many readers and scholars would agree that associating their real-life experiences with the story brings the imagination to life, Felix Martinex-Bonati disagrees. In his article, “The Act of Writing Fiction,” he explains why attaching one’s life to the story destroys the narrative and the imagination.

It may sound unbelievable that attaching yourself to the story can hinder the piece because part of human nature is that we form bonds. These bonds aren’t just with people and animals, but they can be with anything capable of interaction, such as T.V. shows, movies, nonfiction, and fiction stories and music. The way a character is designed or interacts can trigger a memory, potentially giving readers more enjoyment and another reason to keep reading. The readers may also see themselves within a character or world making it more immersive or providing an escape from reality. With these bonds being connected, it raises the question of is it good, is it better to have this immersive world, or should it stay a fantasy and be pure fiction.

One of the problems Martinex-Bonati addresses is when people associate their life with the story, they “succeed only in reading, unsatisfactorily, some fragments of it, and we find ourselves forced to give up this task” (1). Linking with the story takes away its credibility. It makes the fictional world crumble because expectations must be met since that is how the reader imagined the story or character would act. If the fictional world created can be controlled by reality and the reader’s perspective, is it still considered a fantasy world if the reader is in it? The line between reality and fantasy gets blurred, and if the two struggle to be distinguishable, the illusion is gone.

As writers and readers, we must ask ourselves which is the better option. If you plan on writing, would you want the world to be immersive and have the audience feel connected to it? This outcome could lead to a polarizing response since some may love the story’s direction while others may hate it and try to change its direction somehow because it’s not how they would have acted or how they imagined something should have been. The other option is asking yourself is better to have the line separated, making the fiction unattached with a potential loss of readers due to the lack of immersion, which may lead to fewer backseat writers? Both options have positives and negatives, so it is up to you to decide if there should be a barrier between reality and fantasy.

Martínez-Bonati, Félix. “The Act of Writing Fiction.” New Literary History 11 (1980): 425.

Allison Hall

I am not a creative writer.

I have never been, and I probably never will be. The problem for me is the creative aspect. Give me any topic or essay assignment, and I can write my heart out. But, when you ask me to make up my own story, poem, or topic, that is when I completely blank. It was not until about eight weeks ago that I started to have to do some creative writing. In my final semester of college, I had to take one last English class to graduate, and it turns out that class was “Introduction to Creative Writing.” These past few weeks in the class have been a struggle for me. It has been hard to develop my own ideas and translate them onto paper. While I have been having a rough time with this, I have turned more towards my textbook to give me some ideas about what I should write. So, if you are like me and struggle to come up with ideas for that next short story or poem, look no further because I have a few topic ideas for you.

Topic 1: Write about a routine.

For the first poem that I had to complete, I wrote about my night time routine. When writing about my night time routine, I described that exhausting feeling about coming home from work and then going into my relaxing night time regime. What’s great about this topic idea is that everyone has some sort of routine. Whether it is a morning routine, a typical drive that you have to take, a workout regime, or making memorized meals, many of the tasks in our daily lives consist of some sort of routine. These routines can elicit many different emotions, which further expands the topic. By writing about a routine, you write about what you know and describe the emotions and actions that go into completing that task.

Topic 2: Write about an object.

One popular activity to do these days is to go out shopping and more specifically, thrift shopping. So, while going out and doing this activity, find an intriguing object or clothing piece and center a story around it. Have the character be attached to that piece, whether they wear it or have it in their home. Antique pieces found thrift shopping have a life before being sold to the store. By coming up with ideas on where the piece has been, you can start creating many story concepts.

Topic 3: Write about an image.

While in my creative writing class, our professor put up a few images onto the screen and told us to write about them. We were able to write about either what was seen in the image or to make up a story with that image in mind. This idea offered a lot of possibilities, but by having an image in mind, it does not seem like you are starting from scratch. You have an idea and can build upon it. Along with this idea, writing about a painting could also spark an idea. Write about the Mona Lisa or The Starry Night. These pictures and images will initiate a great start to a story.

Emilie Thomas

Yes, you read that right! Grammarly is for more than writing emails and essays—even creative writers can benefit from grammar assistance from time to time. And, lucky you, current CBU students can sign up for a personal Grammarly Premium account for free through the University Writing Center! Contrary to popular belief, Grammarly is so much more than fancy spellcheck—it is an AI-powered application that highlights writing mistakes and suggests corrections, acting as a personal editor to help you on your way to publication. Even the most experienced writers can benefit from Grammarly’s eye on their work—we often know what we are trying to say so well that we skip over minor mistakes that would trip up a reader. Additionally, with a Premium account, you can use Grammarly to define writing goals that will provide tailored suggestions in categories of audience, formality, domain, and intent. There is even a built-in creative writing option that allows for the intentional blending of grammar rules and conventions! With these available settings, you can use Grammarly for any writing situation, from a short email to a doctoral thesis.

To help you, Grammarly also provides a score based on correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery, giving suggestions on how you can improve these aspects of your writing. However, it is important to note that Grammarly is still not perfect, though it improves each time it is used. Some suggestions it offers may completely change what you had been trying to say in a sentence, so make sure to think critically about its changes as you review them. For creative writing especially, it is important to use these suggestions to your discretion to retain your authorial voice! Less noticed, but still cool, Grammarly keeps a record of statistics such as word count, readability, and vocabulary, as shown below. In creative projects, such as writing a children’s book or short story, the readability rating can be incredibly helpful in making sure your audience understands your writing.

If you have yet to sign up for your free, CBU-affiliated, Premium Grammarly account, do it now! It takes less than five minutes, and the Writing Center has put together an informative tutorial video on signing up and using Grammarly to its full potential. The sign-up link and the video can be found at the link below. Happy writing!

https://calbaptist.edu/writing-center/grammarly

By Yage Wang

During both my writing classes and casual conversations with friends, writing is often agreed upon as intimidating. We often feel as if writing is like holding a microphone in hand while everything we say through that speaker is magnified with a stupid stance. With a mindset like that, we have no resolution for the fear but consistently return to the origin of that fear. Two factors trigger this fear: either we have an empty head, no inspirations, no enthusiastic feelings to input, or we uphold too much self-esteem that constrains us from thoroughly expressing our sentiment. I would like to offer a writing mechanism for you to practice using on such fears until, eventually, you’re confident in honing your writing skills. I call it “manufacturing your own Wunderkammer.”

“Wunderkammer” is a German word that translates as the cabinet of curiosities. By definition, Wunderkammer stores and exhibits offer a wide variety of objects and artifacts, with a particular leaning towards the rare, eclectic, and esoteric. The philosophy is that “through the selection of objects, they told a particular story about the world and its history.” So, what does it mean to manufacture our own Wunderkammer?

In general, we should first immerse ourselves in a variety of reading,  accumulate ideas, and make connections with great thinkers across time. Then, having a notebook of inspiring quotes and ideas, and reflecting on them will help construct a Wunderkammer in our mind, like the mind palace in BBC’s Sherlock Holmes. Those precious things we treasure up will surely lead to a burst of imaginative fountains in our empty vase that we can then pour out to others.

Reading until this point, some of you might question the originality of our writing if we are constantly absorbing the nutrition from the previous literary giants. And, to some extent, Wunderkammer will remain a romanticized expression if we skip the last and most significant step– we need to invite people into this wonderful and generous house of information, in which we share and potentially even become source of imaginative knowledge.

Writing will still and always be intimidating, but just like Hemingway states, “There’s nothing to writing, all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” The lucky thing is, we get to choose whom we are sharing our writing with, and who obtains the privilege of entering our Wunderkammer.

By Yage Wang

Everyone loves stories. As we might notice or not, almost everything that we care about in our daily lives is composed in the form of a story, such as games, gossip, tv shows, news, and even posts on social media. Until today, the film industry and fiction writing have come across hundreds of years of examination and development to walk us. It is a remarkable journey. However, despite the rise of the retro trend, readers (or story lovers) cannot use the same-old appreciation to give critiques anymore. Stories are evolving, so should our evaluation of those literary-based works.

Today we will introduce terminology that describes the structure of stories: Kishōtenketsu. It usually includes four parts of storytelling: introduction, development, twist, and conclusion. Not easy as it sounds, Kishōtenketsu can bear the phase of “twist” according to the author’s creativity and logical ability.

A great example will be Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020). The reason for the “great” denotation is that people usually consider movies as productions of affectionate literary works, like Romeo + Juliet (1996), Casablanca (1942), etc. However, Nolan uses this stereotype to pull out a story of justice’s origin. It breaks off the traditional and emotional storytelling on the inheritance of justice, kindness, and heroism. Still, it digs in-depth into the philosophy of consequentialism. This movie challenges the audience’s habit of watching movies with their eyes and heart. For example, we tend to be sad when we see the protagonist cry, and we would likely sigh when we see good people die. Instead, the director deliberately downplayed the emotional resonance of the audience and encouraged us to watch the movie rationally. All in all, Tenet uses a rational attitude to explore a perceptual theme, and that’s Nolan’s innovation on the “twist.”

If you’re interested in developing a short fiction, consider enabling Kishōtenketsu in your story, take some time on polishing, and maybe submit it to us in the following spring Dazed Staring collection.

Happy Writing