Tag: Ray Bradbury

Mannequin Monday – Filling the Void

What do I give myself to when faced with a wide open day? How do I fill the void? A life shift offers opportunity, unexplored space. What will my story be?

Storytelling makes the world go round. I’m reading News of the World.

And again, I offer you another story bite of my own for this week. “The Playlist.”

What I’m Reading/Working On

A friend, a writing coach, asked this week in a social media post: what is your writing goal for this year? I replied by saying, fill the void. A bit humorous, maybe. A touch enigmatic. I’ll explain. My life circumstances have changed dramatically in the last several months. There is now literally a void, a large open space, in my life. How to fill it? So easy to say, I have tons of time to write. Not so easy to actually write.

I need structure to write. I’m not referring exactly to a writing outline, a book plan. There is a blank page, an empty screen, waiting for my words. I re-energized my weekly blog about a year ago with the Mannequin Monday concept. Drape the blank form with thoughts and ideas. The structure I began with was one I borrowed from several online courses I had taken with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Listen to or read a transcript of an author talking about their approach to creative writing. Reply to a few discussion questions, and offer comments on the work of other participants. Read a writing lesson. Write an exercise inspired by the lesson.

The structure worked for me. I had a pattern. I was not creating entirely from scratch every week. And so Mannequin Monday came to be. I am now 50 weeks in. The structure has evolved somewhat. Simplified to What I Am Reading and What I Am Writing. But the focus remains the same. Fiction. Storytelling.

A brief mention of what I’m reading this week. Paulette Jiles’s book News of the World, on which is based the new Tom Hanks film. I like the main character’s occupation: a printer who also travels the country with current newspapers, charging a dime a head to read the news of the world to his audience. The story is set in the years following the Civil War.

I am five chapters in. Perhaps a bit too much backstory for a short book, but a great read so far. More comments next week.

What I’m Writing

Once again, I used Ray Bradbury’s writing guideline: nouns and titles. Make a list of words, titles, phrases. Let a story emerge from the words. Here’s my latest effort.