Wrapped up in Work 🧣
Getting into the SpoOoOky Spirit and Guiding Stories, Colored Pens and Candle-lit Skeletons, Over the Garden Wall and Old Photos, and shout-outs to Five South, K-Ming Chang and Kathy Fish!
What have we been making?
Anna
This month I’ve been taking an online UI/UXcourse to learn some new skills, particularly improving my work using Figma as a design systems program. I’ve also been playing around in Adobe Illustrator to start incorporating more vector animation into my work.
Here’s a cute little 2-frame animation to get you into the Spooky spirit:
Rachel
The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever had is probably also the simplest - Read. A lot. It seems almost too simple, but I believe that reading well can give you all the fundamental skills needed to write well. However, there are some additional dimensions to this seemingly simple advice.
It involves reading like a writer (a phrase I stole from one of my favorite craft books, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose — what a great writer name!).
In his craft talk “From First Draft to Plot” with Tin House, Alexander Chee notes that struggling through stories makes way for the ones that fall into place like gifts. But that is what those stories that seem to appear by divine inspiration are: rare gifts. For the rest of them, it is a struggle perhaps, a trial most certainly. But we can demystify those drafts a bit. In truth, they are puzzles, and like a puzzle, we can work through them methodically. You can, in a sense and to a point, measure a story. By measuring stories we admire, ones that succeed where ours fail or soar where ours seem to fall flat, we can work out how our stories might learn and grow by example.
The first step is to select stories that will serve as guides for your own. What generally inspires me before I even start writing is language, tone, and structure. I am drawn to the poetry and rhythm of writing, so when I am looking for guiding stories these are the first things I look for: Does this story match the tone, mood, energy that I am trying to create in my piece? Does this story have a similar voice, POV, or language to mine? Does this story achieve something structurally that my story needs? And then of course, how do these elements work together and ultimately work with the characters, events, and movement of the piece towards a central theme or final resolution?
Now comes the hard part: deciphering why that story works. For this, I get out my colored pens. I like to annotate the story on several levels and assess how the story moves. In the example above, I annotated K-Ming Chang’s Gloria for how it developed character. I was working on my own flash fiction story, “Cock Block,” at the time, and found that Chang’s story built the characters concurrently through clever metaphor and comparison. I got out my pens and marked the beats of this dynamic and then turned back to my own work. Simply the act of marking the story, of paying attention to its otherwise hidden elements of structure, helped me look at my work the same way - with the eyes of a critical and careful reader.
I do this for nearly all my writing, even the ones that come to me like gifts. For everything from micro-fiction that’s just 400 words long to my novel project, I have selected a group of guiding stories, each of which shows me another possibility of how I might enter my story from a new angle or fresh perspective. But I am always on the lookout for more, for another piece to the puzzle. For this, I need to read. A lot.
What Have We Been Enjoying?
Anna
I’ve been getting into the Spooky season spirit by hiking with Spooky the dog to take advantage of the beautiful fall weather. We also replaced our dying summer plants with a nice fall mum, and of course pumpkins.
I also watched the movie RRR this month, which may be one of my new favorite movies! It’s got ridiculous action sequences, dancing, drama - the works!
Rachel
Because it is October and traditions are very important to me, I have started my annual rewatch of Over the Garden Wall. It is a fantastic show that never gets old. From the stylized animation to the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack, this mini-series is full of immaculate fall vibes. I love this show so much that I dedicated my 2022 Bullet Journal to it.
If you haven’t seen Over the Garden Wall, it is an absolute MUST this autumn season. Not even a hot cup of cider sipped through a cinnamon stick or a freshly carved jack-o-lantern or a crisp sunny walk through an apple orchard will put you in such a perfect seasonal mood.
I have been slowly working my way through Five South’s newest issue, and everything I have read has taught me something. It features fiction and poetry and a host of stunning flash fiction, selected by Kathy Fish. Kathy is an incredible writer and also has a great newsletter that I have been reading and loving for over a year now called The Art of Flash Fiction. Read Five South Issue Five HERE as soon as you get a chance! It’s worth it. Oh, and try to tip the writers if you can (there are options to tip the writer at the end of each piece). I am sure they would appreciate it.
Also a quick shout-out to these iconic photos of Anna and me on a fall walk which were taken almost exactly a year ago:
Loving this newsletter. Thank you so much for mentioning Five South!
You two really got me in the holiday mood. Love seeing you have so much fun and creating such amazing work. Thanks.