Creative Writing for Healing
<i>This is a brief, but effective guide for anyone who finds this, but I must say that my prayer is that the African-American community will utilize the exercises and prompts listed here. This is a guide that is specifically for writing fiction. However, I want to make it clear that you don't have to be a fiction writer or even a professional writer. The primary purpose of this guide is to utilize fiction to focus ideas and thoughts, create a better vision for your life if you wish, and pour personal experiences into a medium that allows you to have freedom in your mind and soul.</i>
<b>Three Ways to Write Fiction</b>
1. Basic short story or novel.
2. Plays, Television, or Movie scripts
3. Poetry, including song lyrics
<b>Four Elements of Fiction</b>
1. Creating Characters - names, personality, gender, place of birth, place of residence, career/education, age, and other important information. This is a fun thing to do. I promise. Think of your own personality type or use that kind of test to create characters. Best-selling novelist, Terry McMillan, has shared over the years that she uses job applications during interviews about her latest books.
2. Create a setting, imagery, and dialogue. The characters have voices. They have a viewpoint, just like you. What's that voice? In the seting, use a real place as a template, even get creative and make up a fictional name for a town/city or country where your characters are living their experience. Be descriptive with your setting using lots of imagery. A great way to do this is to look at a room you're sitting in and describe in as much detail as you can everything you're seeing in a journal or notebook. Describe the outfit you have on at the time you're prearing to write or as a warm-up exercise. Another good one is to describe your hair or someone else's hair you see in great detail. This helps with imagery.. We are often hit with so many images through movies, commericals, television programs, and magazines. Quite often, we're not aware of how they actually effect us, especially the images you don't want to see. You may walk out of the room, skip that aisle in the grocery store, or flip through the pages of that magazine. In some odd way, they still are with you. So, create imagery knowing that possibly someone will be reading or listening to your words and how uyou would want those words to effect the reader/listener.
3. Create a storyline. By this time, creating a story will be somewhat easy, if you've started in numerical order of this list. Where do you want this story to go? Is it based on you, a global event or situation, or ideas and thoughts you may have about something.
4. Creating the Conflict, Solution, and Ending. These are important eleemtns of course, however, by this time, you will have so much to work with the conflict will be presenting itself to you as you write the storyline. Create more than one solution to the problem that arises. Why? Becuase we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Out of fear-based living, we may have believed or still believe there's only one way to get something done. Yet, if we are people who believe in something bigger than we are (i.e., Most High, Creator, God, Universe, etc.) than we know that there's many ways to deal with anything that may arise. For those who are mathematical and scientific, this is proven here also. How many plants are available for one part of the body? How many ways is there to get to a destination? How many ways are there to get to the number four, six, or ten? The ending to the story can be a happy ending, sad ending, or open ending (one with a cliffhanger).
<b>Putting It All Togetjer</b>
Of course, once you've put it all togeher, there is a certain amount of proofreading. When I facilitated this type of workshop as a 5-week and 10-week online course, I did not emphasize proofreading much in the first series, but in the second series of ten weeks, I shared about punctuation and such. So, I'm saying it here, please proofread for spelling and punctuation.
Some folks emphasize rewriting a great deal, but to me, it's a matter of preference. A rewrite could mean that you take away the original premise and storyline that really moved you. I have found when it comes to non-fiction rewriting is important. When it comes to fiction, it's a matter of preference. You could decide halfway though that you want the story to go in another direction, so you can change the storyline, even characters. It's up to you. Some people succumb to what editors want for novels or memoirs, even articles, but if you are doing this for the purpose of healing, a hobby, or a little of both, write this for you. It's your voice.
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