Author: David Jacobsen

Wednesday writing prompt: write an eight word story

writing

My friend Ross has a post up about very short stories. You may have seen those six-word-story prompts floating around, based on Hemmingway’s famous:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

There’s a lot packed into that, right? Well, today’s prompt gives you eight words. Just think what you can do with 33% more material! Here’s my first attempt:

Three brothers. Two hugs. One silent goodbye.

I still have another word—maybe I should toss in an adverb! I like this because it could be about a few different scenarios. But it could definitely get better.

What’s your eight word story?

What’s the deal with section breaks?

editing, writing

I’ve been thinking about when it’s appropriate to use a section break in the middle of a story. When I asked a friend, who writes fiction, he told me he uses one when he changes point of view, location, or when he wants to emphasize that two ideas are both key—this is important and this is also important. I tend to overuse section breaks in my nonfiction, probably so I don’t have to think carefully about transitions. Too many section breaks and you get a story that feels fragmented, but breaks in just the right spot can be dynamic and powerful.

Do you use section breaks? How often, and why?

Why adults should read children’s literature

art, reading, writing

Pivoting off a thoroughly obnoxious post by Joel Stein about literature written for children, which I sincerely hope you don’t bother to read, Andrew Sprung says the following:

…while the best children’s books can bring many core human experiences ‘marvelously’ to life, there are many equally or more intense experiences that they can’t touch.

While there’s nothing wrong with an adult devoting leisure time to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, they are not sufficient. They should not crowd out The Gulag Archipelago, or The Moons of Jupiter, or Midnight’s Children. Confining your reading to children’s books would be like confining your sex life to hugs and kisses…

It seems to me this is nearly as wrong as Stein’s screed, though better intentioned and less obnoxious. Stein thinks “children’s literature” consists of nonsense rhymes and vampire soap operas. Sprung thinks “children’s literature” is broader—that it can profitably engage certain subjects at levels profitable for adults to read, like family relationships or bullying.

But neither of these gentlemen read much children’s literature, clearly. Because it isn’t children’s literature or adult literature that can touch the deepest and most important experiences in life. It’s litererature, period. And some of that is written “for children.” Just as a quick look at the YA shelf shows plenty of vampire soap operas, so does a quick look at the adult shelf! And a deeper, less I’m-too-wise-and-educated consideration of the YA shelf will reveal books that grapple in a profoundly human and nuanced way with everything—everything—“grown up” literature grapples with.

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” ― Madeleine L’Engle

Adults should read literature, wherever they find it. And if you imagine no children’s literature is really literature, well, you haven’t really grown up yet.

…a still, small voice says to us something is out of tune.

art, writing

A friend’s post this morning caused me to type out the first two paragraphs from Frederick Buechner’s Godric. There’s nothing I could possibly write today that could be better than those two paragraphs, and nothing you could do that would be more instructive to your writing and your being human than ordering Godric and reading it.

“Five friends I had, and two of them snakes. Tune and Fairweather they were, thick round as a man’s arm, my bedmates and playfellows, keepers of my skimped hearth and hermit’s heart till in a grim pet I bade them go that day and nevermore to come again, nevermore to hiss their snakelove when they saw me dragging near or coil themselves for warmth about my shaggy legs. They went. They never came again.”

“I spied them now and then, puddling my way home like a drowned man from dark Wear with my ballocks shriveled to beansize in their sack and old One-eye scarce a barnacle’s length clear of my belly and crying a-mercy. It was him as I sought in freezing Wear to teach a lesson that he never learned nor has to this day learned though wiser, you’d think, for sixty winters’ dunking in bone-chilling, treacherous Wear. Not him. I would spy my gentle Tune and watchdog, firetooth Fairweather watching me as still as death in the long grass or under a stone as I hied home sodden on cracked feet, but none of us ever let on that we were seeing what we saw until we saw no longer. I miss them no more or hardly do, past most such sweet grieving now at age above a hundred if I’ve got time straight for once.”

Godric at Amazon.com