FILM-ETTES ON FRIDAYS: so you want to write a novel...

Working Writer (who is also a Working Book Coach and Editor) loves this snarky little film so very, very much.

TOUCHY TOPICS TUESDAYS: the talking wounded

“I’m one of your talking wounded,” the narrator of James Fenton’s poem “In Paris With You” says.

He’s not talking about writing and writers. (He’s in Paris with “you,” so presumably he has better poisson to fry.) But he could be.

Many of us love to talk about our writing, especially in the early years of our careers. I talked for hours about my works in progress when I first began. To this day, I'm sure there are still people in Manhattan who would duck into doorways rather than hear me explain one more of my book ideas. If any of those folks happen to be reading this, mea very very culpa.

Over the years, I’ve learned not to talk about my writing in progress much, not so much out of fears for my already idiosyncratic social life but because it sours my writing. For me, talking about a book doesn’t get the book written. In fact, once I’ve hashed out an emerging story out over coffee, I no longer feel a compelling need to sit down and actually write it. I always write more, and better, when I don’t drain off any of the tension or curiosity that draws me to a piece by letting it escape into conversation. I guess you could sum up my personal rules on this subject like this.

Rule 1: Talk about writing and other writers often. Talking about writing other than our own connects us to our tribe, our craft, our colleagues, our inspirations. It’s fun, and it fires me up.

Rule 2: Talk about your own work in progress very little. Any and all words even possibly related to that subject don't belong in our mouths; they belong on the page.

Are you one of the writerly "talking wounded"? What are you personal strategies for keeping your energy on the page?

FAY WELDON (on Fay Weldon)

Fay Weldon is one of those writers whose diverse yet intense careers delight me. I first saw her name on one of the Upstairs, Downstairs episodes of the 1970s; she wrote the pilot episode and a number of others, all miniature marvels of characterization and story. Since then she has written a score of novels, several collections of short stories, some teleplays, stage plays, and more. Much of her work focuses on women and women's relationships, which she addresses in a rich variety of stances and stories.


Here is her author statement as printed on the British Council's Contemporary Writers web site. Artist statements of any kind, including author statements, are very difficult to write well, but this is a gem. I love the intense and humorous voice, the rich language, the rapid pace...actually, I love pretty much everything about it, I guess:

"Well, there's no time to waste. Life's short, the world's history is long and its societies diverse. If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out. Readers crave explanations of their lives: the writers of fiction provide it, enlarging experience, giving meaning and significance where none was before. I see myself as someone who drops tiny crumbs of nourishment, in the form of comment and conversation, into the black enormous maw of the world's discontent. I will never fill it up or shut it up; but it seems my duty, not to mention my pleasure, to attempt to do so, however ineptly. See me as Sisyphus, but having a good time."

"See me as Sisyphus, but having a good time." Isn't that every writer who loves his or her craft: pushing that giant boulder uphill, pushing, pushing, knowing we can't ever quite get it to the top, but enjoying every laborious moment?

TOUCHY TOPICS THURSDAYS: in which I say why you should read what Nathan Bransford says you should never say

This Tuesday my subscription to agent Nathan Bransford's blog delivered a special gem. His posts are always informative and funny, but this one speaks so eloquently, and amusingly to a readerly habit that makes me sputter with indignation that it just made my day. As you can see, I couldn't even wait until next Tuesday, my usual Touchy Topics day, to share it. I'm not going to say anything else about it (you folks who take my classes know how rare that is). Just click here to read it. Be sure to read past the comic irritation to the real point, about what you as a writer should say, and why. And click on the link for comments at the end to read the dialogue that ensued...a dialogue in which Nathan himself engages. Ah, the delights of the blog!

TOUCHY TOPICS TUESDAYS: rejection response roundup

Let's face it. Rejection is part of every writer's life. And I do mean every writer, not just those who are submitting first books or building early careers.

I've recently spoken to three different authors, all excellent writers with long careers and many published books, who are dealing with rejections because their publisher or the market or lord-knows-what-else has changed directions. And when I get the chance to talk even to the literary or bestselling giants, those writers one would think were absolutely immune, and they all have stories of recent rejections that rankle. A snide review. A publication that doesn't review the book at all. A peer who bad-mouths. A conference that doesn't invite. A book tour that isn't offered. Worst of all, a book that just doesn't sell according to expectations—the author's, or someone else's.

With that in mind, I'm offering a roundup of some online perspectives on rejection from those that know. There are lots and lots of good ones; this is just a sampling. No offense to bloggers or sites I "rejected."

I've mentioned agent Rachelle Gardner before; her blog is one of those I often turn to for clear and sensible comments on the writing biz. I did a search for "rejection" in her blog posts; this link guides you to that location. If it doesn't work for some reason I can't predict, just scroll down the right hand column of her blog until you get to the "find posts on this blog" section and click on "rejection."

I like agent Nathan Bransford's blog a lot, too. How can you not like a guy that explains writing book proposals through the metaphor of making lasagna? I couldn't find a way to search specifically for rejection, but just browsing his blog seems to put things in perspective.

Editor Betsy Lerner, author of the wonderful book The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers, writes a lot of funny, salty posts. (You won't like this blog if you're sensitive to colorful language.) This one is excellent, and so are the comments it inspired. If nothing else, it will remind you that you're not alone.

Query Shark, not surprisingly, rips apart queries. Very funny, very educational, usually very apt. When you read this blog, you're actually glad agents and editors don't send critiques with their rejections. You could send your query to the Shark if you're feeling brave. Be sure to have bandages, blood supplies, vodka and/or Valium on hand when you read the results.

The blog of Dystel and Goderich Literary Management also writes well about rejection. This link brings you to an overview of some of their pieces on the subject.

Going from the sublime to the potentially repetitious, let me close with four very brief "rules" for handing writerly rejection. You've heard all this before, but it's still the best way to approach the ego-bruising reality of a writer's life.

1. Do it enough to get used to it. Rejection never becomes easy. But like some chronic illnesses and your spouse's lame jokes, it does become easier once you've experienced it repeatedly. It's much harder to get rejected once than it is to get rejected ten times.

2. Don't take it personally. They're not rejecting you. They're rejecting a series of words on paper. That's a crucial difference.

3. Keep going. And going. And going.

4. Keep learning. Sometimes rejection isn't a hardship, it's a gift. Had my first book been accepted in its original form, I would not be writing this blog today. Instead, I would be lurking on some obscure Pacific island in ABSOLUTE AND UTTER MORTIFICATION. Is your book really good enough to make you proud ten books from now?

5. Be kind to yourself. Writing is hard. Rejection is hard. Ample supplies of supportive peers, good snacks, frequent naps, and loving family and friends help. A good therapist isn't bad either.

And finally, just so that we end on a more poetic note than this little list seems to be managing, let me quote from the brilliant Barbara Kingsolver: This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address. Hard as it is to accept it, she's right.

AUTHORS ON AUSTEN: but not for "jane-ites" only

A friend recently lent me A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carlson and published by Random House in 2009, and I have been stealing tidbits of time away from my work to browse guiltily through it ever since, like a woman with a sweet tooth who keeps on sneaking away to hit the Chips Ahoy bag hidden in the back of the pantry for one more cookie...just one more...just one.

It goes without saying that a book like this is easier to understand and enjoy if you have read something by and about Jane Austen. But the broader themes of which the collection speaks aren't about Austen per se at all; she is the exemplar, but not in some sense the point. This is a book about why some novels endure while others vanish, about what each new age brings to its readings of earlier literature, and above all about how existing books shape the imaginations of other writers. In that way it's relevant to all of us writers, whether we adore The Great Jane or abominate her.

In the collection there are classic essays I read at some long-ago moment: Virginia Woolf's Jane Austen at Sixty and an excerpt from Lionel Trilling's Why We Read Jane Austen. There are classic essays I feel like I should have read but hadn't, including pieces by E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty, and Somerset Maugham. There are people from my past: an essay by Janet Todd, whose class on British writers I took in college and who I had pretty much forgotten since (no offense to a good and entertaining teacher intended). And there are visions very much of the present. Among this group, I especially enjoyed was Benjamin Nugent's The Nerds of Pride and Prejudice, which calls Mary Bennett of that novel "one of the earliest examples of a nerd in a famous work of literature." But every piece in the book is interesting, articulate, and insightful. Martin Amis, Amy Bloom, David Lodge, Jay McInerney, Fay Weldon: it's fun to see writers we know from their own very diverse and contemporary fiction weigh in on an author from the past who has become part of the collective imagination.

I started to include some quotations from the book in this post, but that became impractical more or less immediately given the multitude of little gems to choose from. I'll offer just one, chosen not because it's the grandest or most meaningful thought but because it reminds us all of something important. This is from Amy Heckerling, whose film Clueless is a brilliant and in a deep sense very accurate updating of Emma. Her essay, which shares some of the story of making her film, is called "The Girls Who Don't Say 'Whoo'!" and reads, in part:

...here is one area where I have some beef with many of the Jane Austen films. The novels Jane Austen wrote are classics, but that doesn't mean they should be interpreted in some sort of "classy" style. They don't require slow, swooping shots of idyllic landscapes. There is no mention in Emma of lush symphonic music heard as the wind sweeps through the heather on the hill. The trees, clouds, and birds can do whatever they want. It's not about them, it's about the people, and the people in Emma are BUSY. The book has the pace of youth—sometimes headed the wrong way, but fast, restless, and exuberant.

A reminder that reading great literature requires us not only to see the differences between its time and our own, but also the things that stay the same.

TOUCHY TOPIC TUESDAYS: are we good enough today?

In the world of professional sports, you hear the same thing at the end of a lot of hard-fought, high-visibility matches. "I wasn't good enough today," Andy Roddick/Annika Sorenstam/Shaun White/Serena Williams/Jeremy Abbott/Gretchen Bleiler will say. Or "It wasn't my moment." Or "S/he just outplayed me." "We just didn't have it," the Yankees/Red Sox/Manchester United/Mercury/Steelers/Rangers will comment. Or "They're really playing well. We just weren't at our best."

I like these moments a lot. I like to see an individual or group that is highly skilled and even more highly competitive acknowledge that at this moment, in this setting, in this particular format, they didn't fail because of the weather or the position of the planet Mercury or their fight with their spouse or the basic unfairness of their sport, they just failed because they weren't good enough...today.

I like it that they don't say, "I'm just lousy and I always will be lousy." Or "I'm always going to lose." (Writerly self-deprecation is next Tuesday's Touchy Topic.) It's good that they don't blame themselves. But I also like it that they don't lay blame on outside forces, either.

I like the combination of honesty, humility about today, and confidence in tomorrow. It's simple, and it's strong.

Why don't writers say stuff like this more?

Rather than complaining about the unreliability of publishers, the greed of the market, the necessity of connections, the sway of short-term fads, wouldn't it be both wise and gracious to acknowledge that maybe, in this particular book, at this particular time, we just might not be good enough? That our book isn't (yet) competitive with Joan Didion or Annie Proulx or Sebastian Junger or David Wroblewski or Nora Roberts or Ian McEwan or Michael Lewis or Grace Paley or Harlan Coben or (insert your idol/envy here)?

I'm not saying that publishers aren't sometimes unreliable, that the market isn't generally greedy, that connections aren't helpful, that fads don't often hold sway. Publishing is full of boneheaded decisions, spectacular misjudgments, and slipshod plans. Agents and editors do miss excellent books and select poor ones. Forces other than quality certainly shape many of the book decisions that disappoint us.

I'm just saying that in our business as in every other, taking some responsibility is sometimes the best policy.

I can't speak for you. But I can say that I'm not as good today as any of the writers mentioned above. I also haven't worked as hard, worked as regularly, read as much, or paid my dues for as long.

I'm not good enough today. I hope I'll be at least a little bit closer tomorrow.

But in the meantime, it's not the flaws in publishing that make the difference.

A BIG BEAUTIFUL WARDROBE, A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE BOOK

I'm always a little envious of people who write really short books that are really good. Jeannette Montgomery Barron's My Mother's Clothes: An Album of Memories is one of those books...the kind that tempts you to say something like "I could have written that," except that you didn't.

Barron writes on her website: "I originally thought of photographing my mother’s clothes as a project exclusively for her, to help spark her memories from the past; she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The project worked; my mother and I looked together at the photographs I had taken and she would remember parts of her past...As [it] progressed and my mother slipped further away, I started concentrating on the small details; her sketches and notes made in her address book (like haikus,), a lipstick kiss on the back of a clothing tag, mounds of costume jewelry. I suppose this project became my way of coping with the loss of one part of my mother, her memory."

And now, like good books of its kind always do, it is playing yet another variation on this theme of remembrance, making readers like me think of their own mothers, living or gone, in fresh ways and with freshly awakened memories.

Barron is a  photographer by trade, but she knows when to speak and when to shut up, a balance that can be tricky for even the most practiced writers to achieve. She's not afraid of keeping her photographs very specific--a single gown, a pair of stockings, a pile of hangers, the size label from a jacket. And the brief texts that accompany each image—never more than a paragraph in length, and often considerably less—pay close attention but never overexplain. You feel the resonance of those empty spaces, and come to know the author and her mother in a way memoirs ten times this book's length don't always achieve.

The phrase "a gem of a book" sounds hyperbolic...but this genuinely is.

CLUTCH TIME: starting to write again

Over the past few weeks I've been working on my own writing again, for the first time since a delicious residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts last fall.

The chance to get back to my own stuff should be something to celebrate, but it doesn't quite feel that way. The pages I've already written seem at once stale and overwritten, never a combo that heartens a writer. I feel oddly distanced from them, a little as though someone else wrote them, but worse; if someone else had really written them, I wouldn't feel nearly so mean or so critical. Sometimes I sit down with them and new pages just flow. Sometimes I sit down with those new pages and the whole thing suddenly stalls. I feel a little like I did back when I was learning to drive a stick shift. It's clear that the damn car can move...it's just not clear when, or how much, or where it's all going, the Autobahn or the ditch.

I know from experience that this discomfort will pass, and that some of the pages I'm so jerkily writing now will turn out to be at least a little bit better than they feel. At least, I'd like to think I know that. It doesn't actually sound very convincing at the moment. No matter how many times I manage to re-start my writing when it's stalled, it always seems like this latest try will be my first failure. I'll let you know how it goes--from the Autobahn, or the ditch.

I'M GOING TO KILL YOU IF YOU MISUSE THE WORD LITERALLY AGAIN. Literally.

I try not to get too grouchy about the increasing numbers of language usage errors that appear today in conversation, on television, even in august print publications. Grouchiness is a slippery slope in midlife: one day you're bitching over a single word, then before you know it you don't like the weather, the government, the traffic, the cost of living, the color yellow, your house, your spouse, your nose, your teeth, your dog, or pizza.

Despite these good intentions, I have to say that the moribund state of word "literally" really irritates me. Once a sturdy little worker bee, the poor thing's been blurred out and beaten down until it's a useless shadow of its former self.

As in: That purse cost like, literally, a million dollars.

As in: He's literally skin and bones.

As in: I literally died.

Part of what irritates me is that there's no really graceful substitute for the word. If you can think of one, do please post a comment below.

I'll be so grateful, I'll literally kiss you.

THE OLD ERA IS DEAD. Pass the shrimp.

It seems that articles, essays, blog posts and other screeds are being written about the death of writing, publishing, literacy, and so on every day. I very rarely (read: never) like them. I'm too innately optimistic, I'm too tired to worry about the problems of The World At Large, and I don't like running around being scared of things except after dark on Halloween (and not very much even then).

Not surprisingly, however, Garrison Keillor's op-ed on this subject in last Wednesday's New York Times won me over. It's charming. It's rueful. It's clever. It reminded me of my days in Manhattan in its image of a roof party at which "...authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do." Once upon a time I too was at such parties (I was the waitress in the corner sticking spanikopita in her pocket as a nice change from Ramen Noodles). I particularly love the ending of the piece--an ending that reminded me that Garrison Keillor doesn't much like running around being scared of things either:

Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.

MAKING YOUR BOOK IDEAS WORK: The Play-Doh Theory

Play-Doh delights the senses and takes a very, very long to harden. It's designed to for radical experimentation. If you don't like what you've made of it, there's lots of opportunity for even drastic change.

Plaster of Paris is gritty, clammy and dull. It sets quite quickly. Once it hardens, you can't change its shape without breaking it.

Too many of us develop our book ideas in plaster of paris. We forget how endlessly and inventively malleable ideas are. Our book concepts get set in stone, so to speak, long before we've pushed them around to see where they need to go. We can' make the alterations needed to reflect our research on competitors, expert critique, or even our own instinct when it tells us something must change.

Thanks to this premature finalization, we end up with books that aren't as good as they could be.

Keep your book ideas in the "play" state long enough to develop them fully, imaginatively, openly.

I keep a small container of Play-Doh on my office credenza to remind me of this. (And occasionally, to open as a micro-vacation. That smell: to me, it's pure childhood.)

A FINE MESS: a metaphor brought to you courtesy of the department of roads and bridges

For the last six months, the state road that leads to my house has been undergoing a vast widening project. The stretch closest to me is now in the grading stage, I discovered when I left to go to the Post Office this morning. As far as the eye could see, the landscape was littered with orange cones, detour signs, mounds of gravel, parked trucks. All so that a single guy could ride back and forth in a small truck pushing a big roller, doing something that seems to have no visible effect at all.

And then I thought: isn't that the pot calling the kettle black (as my grandmother used to say).

A big mess. A long time. A solitary person. The seemingly endless task of leveling. And smoothing. And packing. And balancing. And smoothing again, all to make changes so subtle than no ordinary human can see the difference.

Welcome to the Working Writer's world.

If our work as writers was visible, I suspect it would look just like this kind of road project. No "normal" person, no non-writer, would understand the minute revisions we so often find ourselves engaged in, or the seemingly endless time that they seem to take. But we know that this work is not just necessary but foundational. If we don't get it right, the visible parts of our book or poem, story or essay, just won't work. And if we don't get it right now, it will be much messier--or even impossible--to fix it later, when everything is set in stone. Or in asphalt, as the case may be.

WHEN ABSENCE ACHES: Maya Lin, Language, and Less is More

I came across the web site of Maya Lin in a circuitous search around the web yesterday. You probably know her name from the Vietnam War Memorial, but she's designed a variety of other memorials, buildings, and art installations as well.

It shouldn't have surprised me that her Maya Lin Studio site, like all of her work, is spare, elegant, and supremely thoughtful. Run your cursor across the delicate hatch marks on the black homepage and you'll see closeups of each work emerge, each accompanied by a different musical tone; click on one of the headers near the bottom of the page and the marks unrelated to its topic fall from the visual field like rain. I'm not usually fond of music on web sites, but the sound here is beautiful, and very much a part of the site's minimal, powerful language.

Compared to Lin's web site--which holds a lot of information, I might add--most sites look crammed and haphazard. There's something that speaks to the writer in me here: a reminder, maybe, that great art is built as much with what is left out as with what is put in. It's sometimes hard to trust your own instinct to discard or simplify a text, to go for one effect rather than ten, to speak more strongly to fewer readers rather than less strongly to many. Yet if you shape it right, you can make the space defined by restraint or even absence most powerful element of all. The point isn't that less is more, exactly. It's that the emptiness or mystery are themselves a "more." The soldiers' figures Maya Lin chose not to sculpt. The literal "meanings" Emily Dickinson chose not to explain. All the aching or anticipatory energy of the unsaid, the withheld, the longed-for and the lost.

I'm not sure how Maya Lin had figured all this out by the time she submitted her Vietnam War Memorial proposal at the tender age of twenty-one. But as I wandered through her web site, I found myself glad that she hasn't forgotten it in the decades since.

TERRIFYING MACHINES and times gone by

My fellow writers might enjoy this description of a once-alarming writing tool, which appears in the title piece of Cynthia Ozick’s collection Dictation. The novella opens with a scene in which Joseph Conrad, at the time an author with only one book to his credit, visits Henry James in the older author’s London flat. There he sees—or at least truly notices—a typewriter for the first time.

It was said that the Queen had requested the new thing for her secretary, who had refused it in terror. On a broad surface reserved for it in a far corner of the room….stood the Machine. It stood headless and armless and legless—brute shoulders merely: it might have been the torso of a broken god. Even at a distance it struck Conrad as strange and repulsive, the totem of a foreign civilization to which, it now appeared, James had uncannily acclimated. The thing was black and glossy, and in height it ascended in tiers, like a stadium. Each round key was shielded by glass and rimmed by a ring of metal….Their glassy surfaces were catching the overhead light. Shifting his head, Conrad saw blinking semaphores.*

I love Ozick’s evocation of the typewriter’s alien, oddly malevolent presence. And also the reminder that even in the halcyon days of the early twentieth century, writers could feel threatened—even terrified—by the new technologies that kept arising around them.

*From "Dictation," collected in Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Copyright Cynthia Ozick 2008.

WRITING CRITIQUES: big pictures and piddling little points

Seth Godin's work on marketing isn't directed specifically at writers, but if you're a writer who wants help with book marketing and career building in the age of new media, you can't find a better source. His thoughts are concise and provocative. His books (the latest is Linchpin) are not just useful but also entertaining. And you've just got to love a guy whose web site tells you to click on his bald head to visit his blog.

Seth's recent Sentences, Paragraphs and Chapters post addresses a business issue, but his comments apply perfectly to writers and writing critiques as well. Too many workshops and critique groups focus on piddling little corrections rather than big questions. There's less risk of hurting the writer that way, and maybe less fear that raising those big questions will make us sound arrogant or presumptuous.

You'll notice I said big questions, not once but twice. I'm not necessarily talking about big criticisms, though sometimes they may be needed.

I'm talking about helping each other look at the totality of a book, a career, and a writer's gifts and goals as effectively as we help each other tweak the specifics of a scene, a line, or even just a word.

I also don't mean to suggest that copy-editing and proofing and general manuscript polishing aren't important. They are. But they're tasks separate from manuscript critique and revision...or at least they should be.

Let's not sit around making writerly small talk while we rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's hard enough to keep little lifeboats like the S.S. First Novel afloat in these choppy seas.

FUNCTIONING AUTHOR MARVELS: the perils and pleasures of word choice

It's not every day registering a domain name makes you laugh so forcefully you nearly snort Perrier out your nose, but I had that pleasure recently when I went to buy the domains associated with this blog.

I had figured that "workingwriterwonders" was weird enough that it wouldn't be taken, and I was right. Nevertheless, the computer at the site wanted me to have every possible option, so it made some suggestions of its own.

EffortWriterAmazes. BestWriterOnline. (If only.) JudyWriterOnline. DriverWritingOnline. My own personal favorite, FunctioningAuthorAmazes. (I couldn't use that one even if I wanted to; I'm often working, but to claim that I'm actually functioning is a stretch.) WorkingAtHome Forever: a premium name, the site said, that would cost me a cool $477 for a year.

Then there were the shorter suggestions: FunctioningWriter, WondersAuthor, WorkingAnimals, WorkingAway, EffortAuthor, WorkingHen (another $477 choice, though I discovered I could get WorkingChicken for only twelve bucks), and FunctioningAmazes. Well, indeed it does.

Samuel Clemens famously noted that "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." I like to think he'd be amused at this illustration of his precept, even if it's just a computer with a bug providing it.

As for me, I'm going to save up my pennies until I have twelve bucks...not easy for those of us who are WorkingAtHomeForever. Because I can totally see myself writing a Working Chicken blog.

FIVE MINUTE FICTIONS: open arms, closed door

Set some kind of timer for five minutes. Use that five minutes to write a little sketch or story that includes, and connects, these two images.

If you're still game when you've finished, set the timer for another five minutes. This time, your assignment is to alter the mood of the piece. If your first sketch or story was tragic, rethink and rewrite it in comic or satirical terms. If your first piece was playful or lighthearted, write a new one that uses the same images but has a more somber or serious mood. You may have to change some of your characters or plot elements, but doing so isn't required.

Images are interesting writing-starters because good ones are so often both evocative, and so mysterious. It would be possible to write an entire novel inspired by these two photographs. But luckily, you don't have to.