Some great new Anonymous Questions have landed, my friends. Here’s the first:
It’s a wonderful question but, folks, I’m not the person to ask. I have zero literary talent. I can’t talk about literary writing as anybody but a reader. If anybody is interested in the differences between different types of scholarly writing, I have a lot to say.
We have actual writers here, so maybe they can answer.
Here’s another question:
That’s a very important question because many people are experiencing this. Of course, nobody can cure anxiety over the Internet but there are ways to keep it at bay. Here is one useful strategy:
Be like a recovering alcoholic and make one day your main unit of time and your #1 focus. Plan your day carefully, dwell on how you want to spend its different parts. Whenever your brain skips to what will happen in a year, bring it gently to this day. Are you enjoying the day? What would make the experience more pleasant? At the end of the day, think back to its most enjoyable moments, try to relive them. If there was a particularly good cup of coffee, breath of air, feeling of warmth, think about them and decide how you will maximize such moments the next day.
This is a good strategy for all sorts of things. Writer’s block, lack of focus, feeling overwhelmed, pain management, grief. Concentrate on a very small stretch of time. Try to squeeze all you can from it.
Or a very small number of words. For writers: don’t write a novel. Write a sentence. For readers ” don’t read 5 books a month. Read 3 sentences but right now.
Every time you feel a tendency to lose yourself in future events, enormous projects and daunting plans, veer away and go small.
Clarissa's Blog 
fantastic advice for anxiety. I did something similar by accident the past few days and I feel better than last week.
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The first one sounds like it could be a homework question, but I guess I’ll bite. Constraints I experienced in my (very limited) playwriting were honestly more similar to constraints involved in writing a novel or another longer work, rather than poetry or short stories. I frequently use scripting to plot out my dialogue and the bare bones of actions before combining those scripts with more detailed descriptive writing. I view my scripts as a sort of extension of the larger story, and even the one play I wrote that was performed had a very similar developmental process.
Short stories have a time constraint that I have a difficult time following. I end up treating them as scenes in a larger work, which is why I almost always am working on a serial fiction or a larger work. I just can’t make myself keep a smaller piece on its own with no additional context. When I do manage it, I’m not happy with it—I just want to write more and more, and the short story format doesn’t really allow that.
Poetry is another beast entirely. The creative process can be just as long as any other piece. Words themselves are a constraint—how they fit together, how they go together on the page, the separation between them. Some of my poems were intuitive and easy to write—others have taken years to puzzle out the technical aspects. It can be a lot like short story writing, as it tends to be more contained. Makes me wonder if I can use poetry to outline shorter works I might otherwise have trouble with.
So, I guess in my experience, playwriting is more like novel writing and poetry is more like short story writing. Others will disagree, but everyone has different creative methods.
That honestly turned out to be a far more interesting question than I first thought.
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That’s fascinating. Thank you so much. I literally wouldn’t be able to say any of this because I have no idea.
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On the first one, I recommend Pat Wrede’s blog, at pcwrede.com. She has a lot of great posts about writing, structure, writing long vs short, and so on.
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Am I going to leave two comments, or did the first vanish? For the first question, I recommend Pat Wrede’s blog, at pcwrede.com. She has a lot of great posts about writing fiction, long vs short, structure, different processes, all useful and often entertaining.
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Sorry, it’s the new commenting format, and it’s doing many strange things.
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tick all the boxes
writers think they are foxes …
then fall in a trap
🙂
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