Alyssa B Colton Writing & Editing
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In Your Own Bloom
Composing a Creative Life

  • 3 Quick Ways to Jump-Start Your Creativity NOW

  • Writers and artists don’t wait for inspiration: they call it in. Here are some things you can do to get (or keep) those creative juices flowing!  Ready? Set? Go! 

  • 1. 10-Minute Sprints. 

  • Anyone can find 10 minutes in the day. Set a timer and let go: freewrite, draw, move your body, write out ideas for a project. The only requirement is that it’s productive work on your creative project (this doesn't mean that it has to be work you end up including or are happy about - just produce). Research, reading, or viewing materials, while helpful, don’t count. Set a goal for one 10-minute sprint a day. 



  • 2. Go Random.

  • Open a book or magazine and without looking, randomly put your finger down on a picture or text. Now, without thinking too much about it, use this as a jumping off point for a creative work or think of some way to add it to an existing work; perhaps in dialogue or having your character look at it. 



  • 3. Turn It Upside-Down

  • Choose a project that feels stale or old. Find a new way in. This might mean changing the genre or medium (make a story into a play; make a painting into a sculpture). Shut up any voices that are telling you to “stay in your zone.” Or, it might mean rewriting the opening of your story from a different character’s perspective. When all else fails, go opposite. 



  • Another version of this exercise is to take a piece of work you admire and flip it around. Tell the story from a minor character’s point of view. Paint the garden from the viewpoint of a bug. See what happens when you set Shakespeare in the future on Mars. 









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The Telling Detail: Using Specificity To Tell Your Stories

1/20/2023

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One of the cardinal rules of storytelling is: make it specific. Any time you use stories, specificity helps to translate ideas, which live on an abstract level, to the concrete. 

So don’t be afraid to get real specific in your stories.
 
The trick though is not just using specifics to set a scene, describe a character, or illustrate an action. Good writers understand how to use the telling detail. 

Telling details are those details that tell us more than just what’s on the surface. 

Here are two examples of telling details.

"…the mother shrouded in a filthy ski jacket and tattered pants, draped over her child's closed casket."

The detail, Marion Roach Smith explains in her book about writing from life, relays the mother's grief, "stitched into the details about the jacket." (The word choice "shrouded" also echoes the death shroud, which further reinforces the point. )

Here's another example from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, where she introduces the character Nick:

"He's wearing the uniform . . . but his cap is titled at a jaunty angle and his sleeves are rolled to the elbow, showing his forearms, tanned but with a stipple of dark hairs. He has a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, which shows that he too has something he can trade on the black market." 

The details - and the narrator's observation of the cigarette and what it means - hints that Nick may be predisposed to breaking the rules in this rigid society. 
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Don't worry too much about trying to find the telling detail in your first draft: often these become clearer as you get an understanding of your story's themes. But it's important to be aware of them. Next time you're reading a good book, look for examples of the telling details and see how they add to the story.


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