You found your escape

Give the next generation

Words to share your joy

—Christy Hoff, ArtRoot Writer-in-Residence

Words are my joy. Words are a lot of other things, like frustrating, elusive, illustrative, and downright maddening. I consider myself a writer first and a poet within that framework. Not all poems are stories, but there are elements that they can share. Yes, some poems are stories, I get it. Here we are focusing on the idea of story.

When beginning a piece of writing, I get in the ‘write with the door closed’ mode. [Explain yourself, woman.] Someone once told me to complete rough drafts with the door closed and edit with the door open. If you imagine yourself in a room (or maybe you really are in a room in your house), writing with the door closed allows you to write like nobody is looking. You do not have an editor or reader looking over your shoulder. This is just for your eyes. Experiment with words, paragraphs, ideas, or just plain be sloppy. The important thing is to get the ideas written down.

Now that you have exhausted your creative imagination, edit with the door open. You are preparing your piece for an audience. An editor or a reader is looking. Do they understand your ideas? Are the characters clearly revealed? Is there anything you wrote so quickly you forgot to add details your reader needs to know? If your character fell in the mud, does he/she still have mud on them? Are they dragging it with them into the building? Did you use capital letters at the beginning of sentences and ending punctuation?

On that edit, examine your writing in great detail. This should take longer than the actual writing. Done editing? Now read it out loud. Have someone listen with a copy in front of them and mark words you add or omit. Hearing the piece out loud will give you a whole new appreciation to editing your work.

Your introductory sentence should be an attention-getter. That attention may be questions in the reader’s mind. Encourage them to read on to find the answers.

Another element of a good story is to have a point and stick to it. What do you want the reader to come away with? Would you like to share your love of bicycling, running, knitting, football, etc with the next generation? That would be a great focus for a story. Check out my event at the end of the article.

This is the hardest part. It may be what separates the professionals from the amateurs. Don’t spoon feed every connection. Give your reader some credit for having the intelligence to pick up your work. Let them make connections. If the reader forgets you put a hammer in chapter one, they should remember it when the door is smashed in.

Is your story written from your own experience? That is non-fiction. Fiction is a made-up story. There are some blurry lines between them at times. You get to decide whether you are retelling the event as it happened or using a few specific elements and crafting a whole new story. The decision is based on what you want the reader to remember after the story.

I’d like to help you tell a non-fiction story. Next Tuesday, I have a workshop at Vintage & Modern Books in Racine. That’s December 2 from 5 to 7 pm. Do you enjoy riding bikes as much as I do? Can you knit a beautiful work of art? Is there a passion you’d like to explain to the world (or maybe just your children or grandchildren)? Let me help you share it.