by Neal Wooten
Creative writing is important. Most of us will fondly remember a book because of how the author described one single event. We might even convince ourselves we loved the entire book because of how that one paragraph resonated with us.
Just like anything, the more you do something and the more you practice, the better you get. Some of us just have to work a little harder because it comes more naturally to others. Authors like Dan Brown who wrote The Da Vinci Code and Hugh Howey who wrote Wool make creative writing look easy. The way Hugh Howey describes a person simply walking up a set of metal steps becomes poetry.
I met an author in Milwaukee twelve years ago who had written a memoir about her well-known family. In describing her family’s house, she wrote, “Our driveway was lined with old hardwoods all tiptoeing for a better view of Lake Michigan.” I love that line. She could have simply said there were tall trees on each side of the driveway, and it would have gotten the same information to the readers. But it wouldn’t have painted the same picture in peoples’ minds, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be mentioning it twelve years after reading it.
That is your goal as a writer, to paint unforgettable images in the minds of readers. But you don’t use paint, brushes, and canvas. You have one tool and one tool only – words. Specifically, similes and metaphors. We do this in real life often. “The car left the starting line like a rocket.” To say something is like something else is a simile. Or you might write, “The raging bull decimated the China shop” while describing your husband looking in the fridge for the ketchup. To say your husband IS a raging bull is a metaphor.
When I begin a book, I never think about creative writing. I tell the story in the simplest terms. Once I have a first draft and have gone through several rounds of editing, however, I will go through it a dozen times just to see if I can write certain scenes better. And I have no way to know for certain, but I’m pretty sure this hurts my brain more than it does Hugh Howey and Dan Brown.
In my writing workshops, I go over creative writing. I give the attendees one simple sentence and ask them to rewrite it as creatively as possible. The sentence is, “As the storm raged, the small wooden boat found itself between two huge swells and certain doom.”
I still remember one person’s rewrite from many years ago. “Mountains of angry water rose toward the ravaged skies on each side of the tiny vessel as it was tossed like a wooden coffin at the full mercy of the sea’s Death Valley.” I was pretty amazed at that one. Descriptive writing, similes, and metaphors turn this simple line into an unforgettable scene.
You probably have creative writing workshops near you. It might be worth the time and money to attend. But, like everything, practice, practice, practice.
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Neal Wooten is a contributor to the Huff Post, columnist for the Mountain Valley News, author, artist, and standup comic. His new true-crime memoir, With the Devil’s Help (Pegasus Crime/Simon and Schuster), is being made into a miniseries. He is also the creator of the cartoon, Pancho el Pit Bull, which is being made into an animated series in South America.