Baked by Rachael

My Editor’s Pick this week goes to Rachael of Amateur Writer, Professional Procrastinator for her post, Baked. Rachael incorporated both prompts naturally into her story to build a believable tale of young love. A clever play on the ambiguity of the word ‘baked’ helped establish both the setting and the characters as authentic. The unusual setting, behind a dumpster, worked well to emphasise the clandestine nature of the relationship. The thoughtful pacing matched the unfolding plot; initially hesitant and jerky, then moving into a frenetic passion, and finally evoking a peaceful silence at the resolution. Tension is built through the careful juxtaposition of dialogue between the characters with the narrator’s internal dialogue. Through descriptions of hands, eyelashes, and lips, Rachael gave us an intimate impression of these characters similar to a close-up in a movie, showing each of their vulnerabilities in different ways.

Je kleiner, desto öfter by kathunk

Animal Bread by Jamie

It’s the details that make this story, but it’s also a matter of technique. Where some writers sidelined the prompts this week, casually mentioning a baker passing by (I’m having a hard time not singing the song from Beauty and the Beast right now) (okay fine: “there goes the baker with his tray like always, the same old bread and rolls to sell” and then you never see him again), Jamie’s story couldn’t happen without Linus, the baker at its center. From the first introduction to Linus starting with his hands, the story builds out heavy sensual detail that really lets the reader feel the streets, smell the bread baking. Next we’re gifted with a complex and gently presented understanding of the way children think, the way time passes without us hardly noticing, one roll at a time, and then the last paragraph puts a double-meaning bow on the flavor at the center of the last of the bread.

Rowan’s Roundup: YeahWrite Weekly Writing Challenge #351

When I wrote my first nonfiction post for YeahWrite, the word limit was 500 words. I don’t think I’ve ever struggled so hard in my life to edit everything I wanted to say into a tiny space, not even with microprose. Now that we’re sitting at 750 sometimes I feel like I’m filling extra space. In all that editing sometimes I forget to doublecheck that what I wanted to communicate to the reader got through. See, writing is an act of communication, a building of bonds between reader and writer. This goes double for personal essay. You’ve got to get out of the Navel-gazing Mountains and onto the Plains of Connection. Personal essay writing is more than a journal entry. If you’re writing about something that’s particular to you, think about why it’s important to you to communicate that (it’s ok if the answer is “because it’s funny” or “because it was beautiful and I think people should know about it” – not everything has to be an intimate confessional) and what experiences a reader might have had that would give them an equivalent feeling. Find the universal in the personal, and you’ll have captured that elusive “so what.”

Whew! The grid was pretty evenly split between our fictioneers and poets, and I loved seeing what you did with the prompts and form. With so much going on, I’m going to split the roundup this week so I can talk about both things.

Poets, if you’re not paying attention to what folks like kathunk and Ruby Bastille did with their text, you should be. One way to add nuance to an erasure poem is to make it responsive to the original text. It doesn’t have to be a clapback or even a reinterpretation of the original, but it’s nice to acknowledge your source material. You can even do a “what this really means is” poem.

Fictioneers, 750 words is as awkward for us as it is for the creative nonfiction writers sometimes, isn’t it? You have to fit a whole plot – or at least enough of one that a reader can see the shape of the ultimate arc – into an unaccustomed amount of space. Then you have to do some worldbuilding, character development, and… you know. All that good stuff. Most folks managed it pretty well this week – Gingerbread Man comes to mind – but there’s one piece of advice I want to leave you all with: Remember to give your characters room for failure; that’s what keeps the reader reading to see what happens to them.

Editor Christine here, wrapping up for my very favorite grid to give Rowan’s poor pinkie finger a break. That cut is no joke; I won’t even let her show me pictures. [ed’s note: I tried to show her a really gross one and she declined. If I’m suffering so should everyone else. /rbg]

I know we say “murder your darlings” a lot, but we mean it. If a word or phrase in your writing is so important to you that you couldn’t possibly change it, it’s eventually going to be the worst thing in the finished piece, since it won’t get edited or polished. This week, it felt like a lot of folks (me among them) had our morals as “darlings.” The easiest way to write a fable may be to start with a moral that appeals to you and write toward it, but at the end of your writing process it’s important to make sure you hit what you were aiming at. If you didn’t, you’ll need to go back and change either the story or the moral. My original moral? All that glitters is not gold. I realised fifteen minutes and one semi-snarky comment from my editor after I’d actually posted the thing that I’d need to revise it. I loved the way both Finch Forgives and The Oak and the Swallow headed smoothly for a moral that felt inevitable. See you next month!