eduify | write faster

By Julia H. Jackson

You keep a notebook in your back pocket. Or maybe you are an obsessive blogger. Every time your teacher offers the option of a creative imitation instead of an academic composition, you leap at the chance to make something your own. You file your stories, poems, doodles, plays, and journals on your computer, but the moment someone walks into the room, you cover the screen. You are a young writer, or maybe a secret writer, and there’s something you should know: the best way to develop your literary skills is to share your work with the world.

Intimidated? Bewildered? Not sure where to start? The publishing world can be daunting, but the important thing to remember is that there is no one way to write, nor is there one magic way to get published. There are as many more publishing companies, literary magazines, writing contests, scholarships, and workshops as there are kinds of writers. We at Eduify aim to simplify this new world with the Young Writers Series. We’ll start today by organizing writing contests by genre and style.

Teen Writing Contests

There are some benefits to adolescence. Teen writing contests usually offer opportunities for junior high and high school students to submit their work to magazines and other publications. Many teen writing organizations, such as Teen Ink, offer print magazines, interactive websites, and even book publishing opportunities for young writers. Because many of the writing contests are limited by age (13-19, usually), the probability of your work being chosen is greater than if you submitted your first short story, to, say, The New Yorker. Additionally, many teen-oriented publications offer opportunities to intern, which is a great opportunity for anyone interested in learning more about the writing world.

Teen Voices;  The Claremont Review

Writing Networking Sites

Although writing itself may be a solitary task, the emergence of writing communities worldwide encourages interaction between writers, often leading to collaboration on projects. Not only that, but many sites offer regular writing contests and links to resources for young writers. Sometimes the dialogue that a piece inspires is as valuable as the piece itself. Many sites for writers also have free online newsletters, where subscribers can receive regular updates about upcoming contests and events.

SMITH Mag; The Rumpus; Glimmer Train; Writer’s Digest; WritersCafe.org;  The Next Big Writer

Literary Magazines

Just what is a literary magazine? In basic terms, a literary magazine is a publication (print or online) that accepts submissions of literary work in various forms. The definition itself is often left to the publication’s editors; each magazine has its own style, genre preference, and intended audience. There are poetry journals, fiction and nonfiction publications, multi-genre anthologies, and everything in between. Literary magazines are often the most plentiful (check out the alphabetized list at Poets&Writers and you’ll be astounded at how many just begin with the letter “A”), but sometimes the trickiest to submit your work to. It is always a good idea to familiarize yourself with recent issues of any magazines you might consider, because many magazines receive so many submissions that they will only consider work that closely follows their specific guidelines. All the same, literary magazines are a great way to multiply your options.

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern; Rattle (poetry); New Letters (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, book reviews, interviews); 

Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review (poetry, fiction)

Flatmancrooked (poetry, fiction, essay, audio, art)

So there you have it: three different avenues to pursue your next move as a not-so-secret writer. Not finding what you’re looking for? This is just the tip of the iceberg. Your next job will be to float your work. And just how do you do that? Stay tuned for our next Young Writers post!

by Adam Krause

One of the best pieces of advice about writing comes from William Faulkner, who said, “I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I’m inspired at 9 o’ clock every morning.” If you wait for an otherworldly message from the Muse to hit you before you sit down at the desk, you may have the same odds of being inspired to write as you do of being struck by lightning. It often helps to have some specific, small challenge to meet that gets you to think about the writing process in a new way. In this, the first installment of a series, Eduify presents five ideas to help you start writing fiction.

1) Surprise your characters.

At some point, almost every writer produces a story about a jaded young person who makes cynical, knowing comments about everything around her, but has no challenges or obstacles to confront that she isn’t already prepared for. This is wasting an opportunity to draw in the reader with tension and conflict. Often, the most interesting scenes in fiction are those in which a character is knocked off guard and has to adapt to the situation.

For instance, you might write a scene in which a character has to pretend to be someone they are not, in order to negotiate a set of tricky circumstances. In the process, they might grow into the new identity with more confidence. (This is a variation on the many identities everyone assumes in the course of a normal social day: to quote Indian author Vikram Chandra, “It is very common for a person to speak one language at home, use another on the street, do business in a third, and make love in a fourth.”) Or you might take a cue from Douglas’ Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which one sodden, unhappy character is always followed by rain clouds. He is a rain god, and doesn’t know it. Create a character that causes trouble, or some other recurring event, wherever they go, and has to deal with the consequences.

Finally, you could write a scene between two characters that do not speak the same language, but urgently have to communicate. You do not necessarily have to be bilingual to write such a scene. The important thing is not what the characters, initially unintelligible to one another, say; it is their conflict or cooperation as they deal with the unusual situation that could make the scene into compelling fiction.

2) Stretch your style.

French experimental author Raymond Queneau wrote a book called Exercises in Style, in which a mundane encounter on a bus (an older man tells a young man in a tall hat to move aside, and the narrator later sees the same young man in a tailor’s shop having a button on his coat raised) is written in 99 different and increasingly wild prose styles. For instance, one of the entries is written from the point of view of the inanimate objects in the scene, who naturally see themselves as more important than the people. Another narrator, who uses the anecdote to lodge a complaint against the government, substitutes “taxpayer” each time a person is mentioned.

As a reading experience, the book sometimes feels like it is spinning its wheels. However, as a writing exercise to imitate, it is excellent. Take notes on a public encounter that you witness (something involving at least two characters) and write the same scene using five or more writing styles. If you can’t think of five styles, try taking on the mantles of different authors that you admire. How is the way that hard-boiled detective author Raymond Chandler would see a scene different than the way that free-associative, lyrical James Joyce would see it? Knowing that the author’s palette of words, or how they choose to write about something, is at least as important as what they choose to write about, should always keep you from complaining that you don’t have any writing material.

3) Make headlines.

Now that supermarket tabloids are all about celebrity gossip and unflattering photos captured by paparazzi, it makes one nostalgic for the bygone age of Weekly World News and the old National Enquirer, whose stories were primarily composed of supernatural nonsense. “Bat Boy Endorses Al Gore” was a typical headline, accompanied by photos of a Nosferatu-faced feral creature standing next to the smiling vice president at a campaign rally. “A Baffled Scientist” was often the source quoted for expert opinion.

Make up your own outlandish headline and then write an accompanying fake newspaper story, or other short work of fiction, to go along with it. Or go the opposite route: look in a more legitimate newspaper for a local, national or international story that tells what happened, but not why it happened. Making up the background – the nuanced relationships between characters that eventually led to a newsworthy occurrence, which might be the climax of your story – is part of the fiction writer’s job.

4) Family ties.

One of the deepest seams a writer can mine is their family. But you don’t have to be limited to your own experiences, with your parents as parents and you as the child. You can go back in time and show, with all the clarity and immediacy of fiction, the origin stories of how people became the way they are.

For instance, you might write a scene in which your parents meet for the first time. Did they have a memorable first date? What details of another time and place could come out when you imagine that scene in detail? Or you might have an eccentric uncle who collects rare fish and seems to prefer their company to that of people. What paths in his life may have led him to that state? Pick anyone in your family over the age of, say, forty, and just from anecdotes you have half-listened to, you probably know enough about their past to make them a complex and compelling fictional character. If you don’t know something in their history, make it up. They never have to read it, and you might now be halfway to creating a character of your own.

5) Personal inventories.

There are many ways into a character, but one reliable and deceptively easy way to figure out the person you are rendering on the page is through the objects around them. Some objects reveal a person’s profession and standing in the world: a student’s private school uniform, a musician’s jazz trumpet, a police officer’s badge. Others reveal their personal tastes and quirks: a collection of swizzle straws, a fridge full of condiments but no food. What do your characters have in their sock drawers, duffel bags, coat pockets, locked safes, space shuttles?

Make a list of at least a dozen items each of the characters in your story keep with them. Try to keep these objects physical and tangible so that you can describe them, and stay away from using digital possessions – iPod libraries, and the contents of Facebook photo albums – to sum up your characters, unless their music tastes and embarrassing photographs are absolutely key to who they are. Even if little or none of this information ends up in the story itself, it will make the characters seem that much more real, since the author has gone to the work of imagining their inner lives. And, most importantly, it might be a simple enough project that it breaks your mental block and gets you writing in the first place.

by Adam Krause

With his recent acceptance in Oslo, President Barack Obama becomes one of a few individuals, along with Al Gore and Jimmy Carter, to have won both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Grammy. (Watch out, gentlemen: Bono is on your tail.) However, what he does not yet have, and the following five writers do, is the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature. These writers are not necessarily strange choices for the prize, since each of them received it after a long and distinguished contribution to the literature of their country. But their work itself, which combines the macabre and the sublime, black comedy and original philosophy, pulses with all the vital strangeness of writing that deserves to be read decades later. Genius breaks all the rules.

1) Heinrich Boll (1972)

German critics have called his work “Trummerliteratur”: the literature of the rubble. It deals with the traumatic, bombed-out aftermath of World War II in Germany. He was strongly rooted in his working-class Catholic town of Cologne, and was horrified to see it taken over by the Nazis and then nearly destroyed in Allied bombing raids. His distaste for anyone who misused their power, from fascist governments to hypocritical religious leaders, manifested itself in the acid wit of his books.

Sample work: The Clown

The Clown surely has one of the most depressing covers of all time, and in this case you can judge a book by its cover. The hero is a failed traveling clown who has real artistic ambitions but is often too drunk to attend his own performances, and hardly has the money for cigarettes. He is trying to win back his old lover, Maria, who has married a pious Catholic businessman. But the clown can see with more clarity from the gutter than from the church window: as he tells us, “The children of this world are not only smarter, they are also more humane and more generous than the children of light.”

2) Par Lagerkvist (1951)

Swedish author Par Lagerkvist, by contrast, said that he “had had the good fortune to grow up in a home where the only books known were the Bible and the Book of Hymns.” Religious parables are a prominent part of his work, and his restrained prose style has been compared by one Swedish critic to John the Evangelist: they are “both masters at expressing profound things with a highly restricted choice of words.”

Sample work: Barabbas

This short novel follows Barabbas, the thief who was pardoned by Jesus on the day of the crucifixion. He goes back to his thieves’ lair and wanders about in a sort of daze. His friends worry that he has lost interest in crime (though he does sneak up behind a man in a crowd who has called for the stoning of an innocent woman, and stabs him in the back.) Eventually he becomes a slave working in a mine, and is interrogated by a powerful Roman who learns that he personally met Jesus. Barabbas, who has not become a Christian from the experience but still has a dim inkling that there is something more to life, can only answer: “I want to believe.”

3) Yasunari Kawabata (1968)

Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize. He was orphaned at four and was raised by his grandparents, who both passed away by the time he was fifteen. Without any family to return to, he threw himself into boarding-school life and soon gained fame for both his literary writing and his reporting for the Mainichi Shinbun, still Japan’s biggest newspaper. The public suicide of his friend and fellow writer Yukio Mishima, who did not want to live in a Japan humbled by its World War II defeat (see the film Mishima for a terrific rendering of Mishima’s life and his death by seppuku, which involved plunging a dagger into his own heart while a friend beheaded him) affected Kawabata greatly. He had recurring dreams of Mishima for nearly a year before committing suicide himself, through gas, in 1972.

Sample work: The Master of Go

This was Kawabata’s favorite of his novels, based on his reporting experience as a young man. The aging Go master, Honinbo Shusai, is playing a last match with his reputation at stake against the young challenger Otake. The match, which takes six months due to various stalling techniques by Shusai as he sees with dismay that the younger man has what it takes to defeat him, is a media event that transfixes the nation. Some critics have read it as an allegory of the contest between Japan and America in World War II.

4) Jean-Paul Sartre (1964)

Sartre was one of the last philosophers to be considered a celebrity in his own time: when he was arrested at a student protest in 1968, the French president intervened, telling the police, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” In his most famous work, Being and Nothingness, he put forth the existentialist philosophy that the possibilities of consciousness are infinite, but the practical constraints that life puts on us due to the need to be physical actors in the world are limiting, causing a constant dichotomy and anguish. He is the first Nobel Prize recipient to turn down the prize: he was, by that time, dismissive of literature, which he saw as a way to avoid real political commitment. However, multiple accounts claim that he tried to ask for just the cash part of the prize.

Sample work: No Exit

This play about purgatory, written shortly after Sartre’s experience being confined in a German prisoner-of-war camp, is a demonstration of one of his key ideas: that the gaze of others is what keeps us confined in our societal roles. Three sinners end up in a room together, and instead of the torments of fire and brimstone, they torture each other with probing conversation that exposes their worst anxieties. When the door is finally opened at the end of the play, none of the characters will leave for fear of what the others will think of them. Sartre’s most quotable aphorism appeared in this play: “Hell is other people.”

5) William Faulkner (1949)

This most distinguished of Southern writers was not widely read in America until he won the prize, owing perhaps to the difficulty of his novels, which employ stream of consciousness, radical shifts in point of view and sometimes-obscure regional dialect. His acceptance speech, which can be listened to on YouTube though it is nearly unintelligible, is regarded as the best Nobel Prize acceptance speech ever given in any category. He called upon writers to concern themselves with “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

Sample work: As I Lay Dying

This unusual novel, with most chapters just a page or two long and one as short as five words – “My mother is a fish” – concerns the odyssey of the Bundren family through rural Mississippi to bury their mother in her home town. Fifteen characters, including the corpse, narrate the novel.  Faulkner wrote this book in a period of four weeks while working the night shift at a powerhouse, so don’t complain that you have no time to write!

By Adam Krause

If creative writing is supposed to be about finding an original way to say something, why do people so often fall back on the same few tired phrases when telling other people how to do it? For every nugget of time-honored writing wisdom, there are a dozen great writers that have broken the rule and lived to tell about it. Here are five pearls of wisdom about what to do, and what not to do, when writing. Are these stepping stones to success, or a rock slide that will crush your creativity? You be the judge!

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By: Garin Kilpatrick

Writers Block is a formidable foe.  The following 10 tactics will help you fight writers block and get started on your writing project!  Way back in my high school days I remember having to do stream of consciousness writing projects in class.  These were simple exercises where we wrote down whatever streamed into our brains.  This task helped me come to realize that having great writing is not the most important part. Having great Editing is. If you have suffered from writers block in the past, don’t worry, the problem was all in your head. Take these next 10 tips to heart, clear your mind, and get ready for worry free writing!

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