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1WINTER, 2007 Anne Lowenkopf 
Introduction to Writing ‘07
By Anne Lowenkopf Here you are, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, giving me two hours of your life.Why?
 
My guess is because you want to write or learn how to how to write better.
 
But perhaps you’re here because you want to be published. That’s trickier. Withthe merest of exceptions—those with pathological language handicaps—anyonecan learn to write. Being published requires writing skills + conforming to agents’and publishers’ requirements + luck. Conforming to agents’ and publishers’requirements is tedious, taking up a certain amount of your time and attention butnot difficult. Luck is anyone’s guess. My best advice is to plunge ahead with yourwriting and hope luck will be there for you when you need it.
 
So, let’s get back to writing. Writing fiction is a matter of communicating bits,hunks, chunks, sections of human experience into written language. Basicallywhen you write fiction, you are telling a story about a part of one or severalpersons’ lives, your own or others’. By the time you’re sitting in this classroomyou’ve witnessed bits of hundreds of people’s lives. So why is it so difficult whenyou sit at your desk and try to write?
 
The difficulty is that though you have witnessed bits of hundreds of people’s lives,though you have thought about them, felt about them, have opinions about andattitudes toward them, perhaps have stories about them running around in yourhead, you’ve little experience in writing about them.
 
Witnessing and feeling, even thinking, largely are accomplished nonverbally. Weaccomplish these behaviors through images, through emotional response, chemicalsecretions, hormonal flow, muscular tensions and relaxations, all of this, all at
 
2WINTER, 2007 Anne Lowenkopf once, with occasional words tossed into the stew.
 
And now you want to put these thoughts and feelings and impressions onto paper,or more likely to tap it into bits into your computer. But those few words you’vebeen using don’t stretch to the task. By themselves they don’t tell the story. Oftenthey don’t even appear in your mind when you reach for them. Often the narratorin our normal consciousness isn’t even aware of their full content. It’s frighteningand frustrating.
 
You think you know how to write—they taught you in elementary school—but themechanical scribbles and keypresses of writing are only the first step in writingfiction and memoir. For storytelling you must be able to translate all of the silentparts of your experience into words that enable your readers to approximate yourown experiences and the experiences of the characters whose stories you aretelling, using words alone instead of all the chemical and kinesthetic componentsof ordinary thinking.It’s a hard-won skill, not programmed in the genes. Doing it—writing fiction onpaper-- is accomplished only through learning. And learning, though it can befacilitated by coming to the classroom and sitting in uncomfortable chairs, islargely accomplished by putting down in written language what you hope toconvey. You learn by trying, by doing what you hope to do, just as you learned todance or drive a car.To begin with, you open yourself up to what you want to write. Visualize it, feelit, and as soon as something comes strongly to mind, begin describing it as bestyou can. Don’t expect fine writing to emerge; demand something. For beginners,or those who have been blocked in writing for some time, I recommend writingsomething if only commands to yourself that you write and snarls at the difficultyuntil you produce a couple of pages of actual writing every day, certainly ever timeyou sit down to write.
 
For those writers who have progressed enough so they actually have thebeginnings of a short story o novel, remember this: Rarely do we know all of ourfirst draft when we begin. A completed first draft is almost always a matter of 
 
3WINTER, 2007 Anne Lowenkopf slow accretions, like the growing of a stalagmite. But you know something.There’s something that you want to communicate—a relationship, perhaps just theconcept of a character, a location, a mood, someone’s reaction. Something.
 
Even those of you who are hard at work on a project consuming all your writingtime would do well to establish in your computer a folder called Journal orNotebook. This is for those times when you aren’t and can't work on yourproject. And those who don’t have a project—can’t seem to come up with one—write every day something to feed your notebook—a description of brushing yourteeth, a quarrel between lovers, what your bedroom looks like or someone’sappearance. Anything will do. From time to time throw in a conversation, a trainof thought.
 
Be faithful, and your notebook will lead to a project.
 
Begin with a specific. Write about it. Try writing fast, with as little self-editing asyou can manage. If that something specific turns into something else, don’t stopor try to force it back into its beginning direction. Write as long as thought andfeelings prompt words. When you’re stuck for a word or the right word for whatyou’re trying to describe, put in an approximate, and if you don’t have even that,put in some XXX’s to be translated later.
 
Of course whenever you write you hope to get it right.
 
Hope implies the possibility of failure. You might get it down on paper, on thescreen satisfactorily the first shot. Or you might not.How do you know what’s satisfactory? You read what you’ve written aloud toyourself. Does it sound pleasing to the ear? Does it make sense? Does it conveythe feelings and experience you wish?When it doesn’t, try again.Eventually you turn your writing in to an editor, a teacher, to one or a number of associates; you read it aloud in a classroom. Does it sound right to them?
 
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