How to Boost Creativity and Improve Your Creative Writing - 2022 - MasterClass
Joyce Carol Oates is known throughout the literary world for her riveting imagination, which manifests vividly in her novels, short stories, and plays. Here are some great tips from Joyce on how to infuse your own writing with creativity:
- Sharpen your powers of observation by journaling. Journaling is an effective way to heighten the degree to which your attuned to the world around you. When writing in your journal, push yourself to describe the places you visit—who populates them, how they look, what they smell like, what sort of food or plant life or architecture you see. Record dialogue you overhear or conversations you have with the people you meet. Becoming familiar with how people speak and the subjects that move them in conversation will help both with writing creative dialogue. You’ll find yourself relying on this information as you set off to write the first draft of your novel or short story.
- Write at odd hours. Scheduling your writing time is important, but it’s also a worthwhile practice to write at odd and spontaneous hours, when your mind and mood are altered.
- Keep writing sessions short. Joyce encourages writers—whether they’re self-publishing or full-time published authors—to give themselves writing assignments consisting of no more than 40 minutes to write. A limited time frame gives you the freedom to not fuss over your work and to write into the rush of creativity.
- Write when you’re feeling ill at ease. Believe it or not, Joyce encourages aspiring authors to write when they’re incredibly tired, busy, or even feverish. After allowing a new mental state into your process, you might look over what you’ve done and see something with new potential.
- Capture your daydreams. Allow yourself to daydream about your stories and take notes. Go on a walk, Joyce says, and then return home and write down any thoughts about a particular story: characters, details, dialogue. If you repeat this action for a few days, you’ll likely have the disjointed outline of a story.
- Get outside and move around. Getting out of the house and moving—going for a walk or run—has been a part of Joyce’s process for years. Many writers have found physical activity to be a way to both activate new ideas and facilitate the creative processing that physicality and distance create. “In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain,” Joyce wrote for The New York Times in 1999. Many writers, including Haruki Murakami, Malcolm Gladwell, and Don DeLillo, have felt a similar connection between exercise and writing.
- Make checklists of details. When an idea for a story starts percolating in your mind, do some research. Think about your setting and motivations for writing, and then make a checklist of details you might want to include in your story. When Joyce set a novel in the nineteenth century, she made many notes—not all of which she used—on the kind of furniture, objects, and other things that might populate this world. Then she marked off the details that she included in the book as if she were completing a checklist.
- Be bold with form. The most important rule to remember in fiction is a simple one: Don’t be boring. Experimenting with form—surprising yourself and readers with structure—will pay off. For instance, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides uses the nameless, plural narrator of a group of local boys, simply referred to as “we,” to tell the mysterious, dark story of five sisters in town. By making this stark decision, Eugenides amplifies the mystery, loneliness, and voyeurism in his subjects. In Eric Puchner’s short story “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan,” an intimate portrayal of desire, womanhood, and broken family relationships takes the form of a high school essay on Greek mythology, emphasizing the narrator’s own troubling innocence and doubling down on the melancholic mood and feeling of fate in the story’s ending.
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