Clear Out the Static in Your Attic: A Writer's Guide for Turning Artifacts Into Art

By Rebecca Bridge and Isla McKetta

An easy-to-follow guidebook. This is the ultimate collection of fun and thought provoking writing inspirations, exercises, reflections, and prompts for story
writers and poets alike. This book includes prompts, examples, and helpful nuggets of creative power to set you
on your way to writing the best work of your life.Your mind is like your attic -- it's already filled with everything you need to write your story or poem -- a lifetime's worth of material. We're here to help you take your memories along with the wealth of words that are already part of your life and assemble them into stories, poems, and essays.

Organized around items you might find in an attic, the prompts in this book will help you find inspiration in everyday objects and experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
• Release date: Aug 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781938912597

Rebecca Bridge

is a graduate of The Iowa Writer's Workshop, former National Poetry Slam participant, a screenwriter, a poet, a writing professor, a memoirist, an essayist, a novelist, an editor of the Columbia Poetry Review, a guitarist, and a painter. Her work has been published widely in places like The Boston Review and Sixth Finch and she's won fellowships, like the Iowa Lakeside Fellowship, and contests such as The Indiana Review 1/2 K Prize, an Eileen Lannan Prize in Poetry, and Donald Justice Memorial Prize in Poetry.

Book preview

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INTRODUCTIONS

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.

∼ William Zinsser

If the act of calling yourself a writer somehow magically meant that every word you typed was always the exact right word in the exact right place, all of your stories were miraculously resolved in the most fulfilling ways, every essay you produced made a very important observation in a very intuitive and breathtaking way, and each poem reverberated with the wisdom and the beauty of every wise and beautiful thing that’s ever existed, well, what fun would it be to call yourself that? Like King Midas, I think you’d soon discover that there’s a downside to having all you touch turn to gold.

That’s because truly great writing is born out of the struggle of producing it. Writers learn as much about the world when they toil to put their experiences into words as they do when they’re experiencing it the first time around. When people say that writing is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration, they’re not lying. When they say that writing is a craft that is learned, not inherited, that’s the truth. And when they say that writing, for a writer, is hard, but not as hard as not writing, well, there’s the rub. That’s why we’re here sweating and crying and quitting and, as if by some miracle, occasionally producing work that we can be proud of. Which we then set aside so that we can move on to the next thing. Learn to love this process, because it’s never going to change.

And that’s exactly why I wanted to write this book that you’re about to read. I know what it’s like to be standing on the wrong side of a bad day feeling like you’re never going to write anything worth reading. I know what it feels like to want to give up. But I was lucky, and I had people around me who stepped in and told me that quitting wasn’t an option. I had to teach myself strategies to keep on chugging even when the train was out of steam. I hope that you can find some inspiration in these tactics. Because I don’t think you should give up. I think you should press on.

– Rebecca Bridge

SPARKS IN THE ATTIC

Your mind and the world around you are both like your attic. They’re already filled with everything you need to write your story or poem—a lifetime’s worth of material—even if you don’t know it yet. We’re here to help you take your memories and the wealth of words that are already part of your life and assemble them into stories, poems, and essays. We know that by sanding off some rough edges and adding a little metaphorical paint, you’ll find that you have something fantastic. Sometimes, memories are imagined. We want you to rediscover those, too.

Writing is the hardest thing I’ve ever loved doing. If you have better, easier means of expression available to you, save yourself now. But if writing is what calls you, use this book to navigate the siren song and learn to produce the very best work you can. You’re going to learn how to be a better writer, but more importantly, you’re going to learn the tools to become your own best (that’s most productive, not meanest) critic. You’re going to learn to write the works you were meant to create and the books you want to read. And no one could ever write your stories, poems, and essays as well as you can.

We’ve organized each exercise around something you might find in an attic. If you feel stuck, stick close to the exercises. But if a few words spark something creative and wonderful in your brain, go with it. We’ve provided short examples to get you thinking, but you should write as long as you want. You might find yourself influenced by other writers to start with. That’s normal. Most of us try on a lot of voices before we start to listen to the one coming from inside of us. There is no wrong way to do it if it gets you to the page. When you start editing, save an old draft or two up in your real attic. Someday someone is going to look back at those drafts and be amazed at the process you went through on your way to creating beautiful work.

– Isla McKetta

INSPIRATION

The word inspire comes from the Latin verb spirare, which means to breathe. At its heart, inspire means to breathe life into. Oftentimes, that’s exactly how we think about inspiration, as if it’s a gift that comes from somewhere outside of ourselves—from the gods or the Muses or the earth— and is not actually something that we as writers have autonomy over. Actually, inspiration is a process that comes from within; you just have to figure out how to help the ideas start flowing. The following exercises are meant as starts to help you develop a relationship with your inner muse.

BABY SHOES:

TURNING SMALL IDEAS INTO BIG STORIES

As the story goes, at some bar somewhere, perhaps in Cuba, someone challenged Ernest Hemingway to write a story in just six words. An impossible challenge, obviously. Yet Papa Hemingway simply smiled, grabbed pen and paper, and wrote For sale, baby shoes, never worn. Boom.

Who knows if anything about that story is true; really it doesn’t matter much anyhow if it was Hemingway or someone else who wrote it. What does matter is what’s at the heart of those six words. The actual story that’s happening inside of those words isn’t mentioned at all. Hemingway was a master at that, leaving the juiciest bits of the story completely unwritten, but still easy to find in the words on the page. The story that’s left untold.

– RB

EXERCISE

For this exercise, I want you to find your own metaphorical pair of baby shoes stashed away in your attic. Try writing some Hemingway-esque six-word stories, only I don’t want you to stop there. This exercise isn’t about writing the world’s shortest story, it’s about laying out a roadmap for your writing and filling in the bits in-between. Devise a series of short, succinct sentences that convey, but don’t explicitly state, a deeper meaning. Make sure there’s something that the reader can infer from your words hidden beneath the surface. Come up with a nice-sized list. Now take three of them at random and put them together on the page. Allow those three simple sentences to determine the narrative that you write. You’re going to stitch them together utilizing even more words as your thread. Be inventive. Let your mind wander. Think about what the deeper meanings might be. When you’ve finished your first set of three, keep going with three more. Allow a story to develop and follow it to the end.

EXAMPLE

It choked and then it died. + He’s in the front yard and she runs. + I am a stranger here myself.

There wasn’t a lot to say that was much good about the little humdrum town Kelsey’s car had finally given out in, it was little more than a collection of houses that could use a coat of paint or three and a cinder block grocer, at least the streets were set up like a grid. She’d still had a good idea where she was at. She’d been wandering them for an hour or more while the local mechanic, a guy named Larry who worked on cars in his front yard, took a look at her station wagon. It was surprising that her car had even made it four states over before seizing up, choking out smoke, and dying on the side of the road.

I’m sorry to drag you out on a Saturday, she’d apologized, when he’d gone out to the road to look over her car, a half-eaten ham sandwich still in his hands.

Ma’am, I’ve lived here all my life, he’d replied while rummaging through his toolbox, And I am a stranger here myself.

It hadn’t felt like she had a choice when she’d come home two days before and found her father standing in the yard of the house they’d shared when she was a kid. He was supposed to be locked away in the federal prison. Before she even knew what she was doing, she’d turned right back around and she’d run. She’d run and run until her legs ached and then she’d kept right on moving.

BOOKS TO EXPLORE

Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

Glass Grapes: And Other Stories, Martha Ronk

Telegrams of the Soul, Peter Altenberg

BOOK OF POETRY:

FINDING INSPIRATION IN OTHER WRITING

If you’re a reader like I am (and I hope you are, because nothing teaches you to write as well as close reading does), you’re bound to come across passages in books that knock you flat with inspiration. I do. The first thing I do when I sit down to write is read someone else’s work. By reading the way other writers have created imagery or bent grammar, I learn about new ways I can use language better. Sometimes I’ll see a writer sum up the entire feeling of a book I’m writing in just a few words and that helps me delve deeper into the passages I’m writing. You’ll see many writers put an epigraph (a short quote from other books that speak to the theme of the overall work) at the beginning of a book or section. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum is littered with epigraphs. The first time I read that book I fell in love with the mystery of those epigraphs, some of which were not in English, and how they tied together. Those quotes from other writers are like keys to another dimension. Not only do they clue a reader in to a deeper meaning in the text, they’re also a great starting point if you’re building a reading list and love the book in your hands because writers are usually quoting only the writers who have taught them something about writing or life.

– IM

EXERCISE

Epigraphs can be deeply inspirational and, in the right cases, can really shape your work. Check the front of some of your favorite books and if the author has included an epigraph, think about how that one quote relates to the book. Consider when the writer found that quote and how it might tie the whole story together. But that’s all for later. Your duty with this prompt is to take a quote from another writer or novel that inspires you and write a story or a passage based on it. You can write something that’s closely related to the epigraph as Eco did in Foucault’s Pendulum, or you can merely use the epigraph as a starting point. Let your imagination be your guide.

EXAMPLE

I entered your waters slowly, step-by-step

—From After Rivers by Czeslaw Milosz

I still don’t remember everything that happened at Wesoly’s—as if the moments in-between didn’t happen or time got folded over onto itself. I think Zielony watched out for me. But I can’t ask him what happened because I can’t say out loud that I was too drunk to know what I was doing. I didn’t want to go to the park and I didn’t go to the bunker. Then, as now, all I wanted was to listen to the soothing voice of the current—to concentrate on the river until I saw past her grey reflection, past the individual droplets, past the molecules and atoms—to stare deeply into whatever it was that made the water water—whatever explained why it existed at all. The river didn’t care that I passed out drunk. The river didn’t care that I didn’t remember. The river didn’t care that anything in the world could have happened to me. She