Tag: Creativity

Subverting Expectations on The Visionary Level

~ Jamal H. Goodwin Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Life Is Larger Than What We See In Our Heads

If I said to you, “Look! It’s a trucker!” odds are, before you turned your head to look, your mind would conjure the image of a male. You’d be less likely to imagine a female tricler, or a trucker with vitaligo, or transgender trucker, even though all those things are valid and exist in the real world.

In the real world, we walk around with subconscious biases for how things ought to look and sound, and this may be based on how things commonly are, or based on stereotypes that are far off from reality. Regardless, the biases exist within us and effect our expectations and therefore how we interact with the world.

So when we see the unexpected, say, a female trucker, we are momentarily shocked—we’re put in a situation we aren’t usually in, which forces us to be in the present moment. There’s no subconscious pattern created for novel situations. And following said experience, we’re more likely to remember it since required more brain power to process and navigate.

The Unexpected Can Enhance Your Writing

The principle of the unexpected—of people and situations that don’t neatly fit into our common ideas—this principle can be used when crafting stories. Concepting a story where a belly dancer is revealed to be a man, or a story where the setting is described as a house but is revealed to be a dungeon—these stories shock readers, make the narrative more salient in their minds. By practicing your skills as a Visionary, someone who plays around with the various ways a single story can be presented, you, too, can create plots that hook readers.

If in a story I say there’s a waitress, a generic image will come to mind. But if I have a story set in China with a Muslim waitress wearing a hijab, you’ll see something more vivid. And uncommon. Questions will come to mind: how is the woman speaking Chinese? Was she born there? How unique!

Subverting expectations can have splendid results. When creating a plot for your next story, try experimenting with this.

Goodbye, Tarantula

~ Jamal H. Goodwin Jr. ~ Leave a comment

            Tarantula skittered from the snowy window into the dust-ridden bedroom. She paced left and right. She could sense the termites eating away at the bedframe, and the carpet beetles shimmying out the closet. But overlapping those signals was the mouse family’s squeaks: the voice of a mother comforting her children from the hailstorm. Tarantula left the room.

* * *

            After several hours exploring the nooks and crannies of the house, Tarantula found a cubby-hole on the floor beside the kitchen sink. She crawled in and allowed herself to get comfortable.

* * *

            The footsteps of an ant colony. She detected a line of them trooping past her. She swiped them into her mouth without hesitation. They scattered, and she lunged after a few more.

            When they were gone, she remained standing. Still as a stone.

            Minutes passed. Then she crawled back into her den.

* * *

            A high-pitched screech alerted her. It was followed by a second, crackly voice. She exited the den. The sound was laughter. Tarantula traveled to its location.

            She entered the living room and found, on the knotted carpet, a turtle lying on its back, and two ravens standing before it.

            “You buffoon!” One of the ravens said. “What, did you think you could run from us?”

            The living room was bustling with traffic. Tarantula could sense it. The roaches congregating under the furniture. The flies hovering by the molded wallpaper. She saw a stinkbug stroll past the turtle and the ravens.

            “If only we could rip you out of your shell,” the raven said.

            “Had our beaks been sharper,” the other raven said. “We’d pierce that meaty head of yours.”

            One of the ravens turned its gaze directly at Tarantula. Tarantula stood motionless. For minutes. Then she skittered back into the kitchen, back into her den.

* * *

            From a window, white light poured into the kitchen. Hail was replaced by snow flurries. From a hole in a tree, the cheerful chirps of sparrows. Remarks at the prettiness of the snow. The desire to fly out among it.

            Tarantula could sense this. Just as she could sense the presence of the ravens, still somewhere in the house. Just as she could deduce the turtle was still on its back.

* * *

            Hours passed before Tarantula left her den. When she did, she went straight to the living room, and flipped the turtle right side up again. At this, the turtle beamed.

            “Golly, thanks!” the turtle said. “Thank you so much! I thought I’d be scrambled like that forever!”

            Tarantula stood motionless. The snow continued outside the house. Tarantula turned. The turtle tried to mouth something, but couldn’t think of more to say.

            A blast of wind sounded and the turtled leaped into its shell. Angry caws echoed in the room. Then silence.

When the turtle poked its head out, Tarantula and the ravens were gone. The turtle stood and walked toward the open window.

            “Goodbye, Tarantula.”

My Dream Creative Writing Club

~ Jamal H. Goodwin Jr. ~ 1 Comment

When I was in Temple University, I was part of a campus lit mag called Hyphen. It published annually. Meetings were weekly, and anyone who attended was considered an editor, able to cast a vote for the acceptance or rejection of a piece. Pieces included art, poems, and short stories, and while editors could read in advance, time was given during each meeting to review a piece before casting a vote. Hyphen had a fun and simple formula, one fruitful for socializing and for keeping the creative juices fresh. The submissions we reviewed enlightened me on new ways to use prose, as did hearing the critiques from my fellow members. And the memes we’d share amongst each other? Priceless.

But even at the time, despite my love for Hyphen, I knew more could be done. For example, we could’ve had guidelines on how many of each submission type we’d accept. Regarding what got put in the magazine, we pretty much went with what got the most votes, and poetry was super popular; little room was left for short stories. We also could’ve had punctuation, formatting, and style guidelines, maybe even a word count, to keep pages visually consistent. At the end of the semester, once all the pieces are selected, editors transition from voting to grammar repair. Having a style guide would give editors more to do, more skills to practice, and also more to put on a resume.

But this is my dream club, right? So anything goes? Cuz I’d LOVE to have workshop sessions, for editors and potential submitters for their poetry, prose, and artwork submissions. Imagine a feedback and critique session, with the chance to submit again later on.

How about having themed issues of a lit mag? That would be cool. Open mic sessions to perform/practice poetry. Drawing sessions. Writing sprints.

Oo! Here’s a good one. Analyzing grammar in excerpts of prose or poetry, picking paragraphs apart for literary devices and syntax tricks like a ravaging grammar wolf🐺

There could even be sessions where we read short stories and analyzed them on the macro scale—plot, character, theme instead of writing style.

A writing club that combined all these things would be the best writing club ever. Who knows. Maybe I’ll be the one to start it…

So… Where Do Sentences Come From?

~ Jamal H. Goodwin Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I’ve noticed something. When I’m writing, there are days when I feel invigorated—“Yes! Did you read that sentence?! I’ve got the magic touch!”—and there are days when I feel muddled—“Bah! I’m slogging through quicksand. The words just don’t sound right…”—but in either case, when I become self-aware of what I’m typing, or of the words I’m scribbling in my notebook, I ask myself: “How literally did I come up with that sentence? Like, literally, literally. (Not hyperbole literally.)”

How is my brain deciding which word to place next to the next word? There are a ton of synonyms for things. Why did my brain decide to write “It’s burning up in here” instead of “I’m burning up in here” or even “It’s too hot in here”? You might read those examples and think, “well, ‘it’s’ implies everyone’s hot while ‘I’m’ implies only the speaker is hot.” But on a conscious level, I’m not thinking of the differences at all. I have an idea that my character is sweating, and so my brain thinks of a sentence that I type onto the page. But what causes me to create one sentence and not another?

If you’re anything like me, I know what you’re gonna say, so let me stop you right there: no, the blanket statement “the subconscious mind” is not enough :P. I want to know the exact pathways of the subconscious, how the brain runs through its word binder and decides the best possible words for a situation. Or the worst words. Because the brain doesn’t give us the best sentences each go around. If it did, we wouldn’t need editors.

Unfortunately, dear readers, I am not a linguist. But as a writer and an avid grammar fan, I can recount the wonders of noticing how sentences are made, and I can speculate what it would be like if we had the power to always choose the right words.

The Art of Choosing Sentences

Here’s a helpful perspective: perhaps sentences being spoken or written unconsciously is a gift, in the same way breathing is done unconsciously. With both writing and breathing, some unknown part of us does the heavy lifting. I know I’m writing this sentence just as I know I’m breathing, but I’m not consciously doing focusing on each step. I’m not searching my brain for each individual letter, each logical part of speech, each word. All I have to do is stay on topic and the rest is guaranteed.

But in the same way manual mode with breathing allows us to meditate for calm or hyperventilate to psych ourselves up, taking conscious control over sentences allows us more flexibility, more power, and more possibilities in our prose. Take this sentence for instance: “The hat that you’re wearing looks nice.” This sentence is pretty straightforward. You might type it as a line of dialogue for a character and move forward, not giving it a second thought.

But when you do give things a second thought, you might find it outdoes the first. In the middle of typing a line of dialogue, you might pause and allow more noun and verb ideas to enter your head, or different pacings of the sentence, or unique tones of voice. You type a new sentence: “Nice hat you’ve got there,” but you want to know what else you’ve got. You toy around with it some more: “Wearing a nice hat there,” “Where can I get a hat like that?” You even go back to the original sentence but omit the “that”: “The hat that you’re wearing looks nice.”

Things get even more interesting when you factor in the different sentence types. The content of these two sentences is the same, but the order of the words changes your focus, and the use (or not) of a comma affects the cadence:

“Once I got home, I took out the trash” vs. “I took out the trash once I got home.”

In the former sentence, the crux of your attention is on the endpoint, taking out the trash, with the arrival home a backdrop to that action. The latter sentence’s focus is the reverse: we’re supposed to care about the arrival home, and the trash was just a sidenote of what happened there. Meanwhile, while writing about one of those two examples, we might consider the pacing of the sentences around it. If there are a lot of commas in a paragraph, we might choose the second variation since it lacks a comma—it would read faster, thus breaking up the pace. Likewise, in a paragraph of short, rapid-fire sentences, you’re better off with the comma version, which would give readers a chance to slow down.

These variations are by no means the end. We haven’t even factored in accents or slang! Just know, when you stop to reinvent a sentence—instead of using one as a mere tool—you can create something you’re truly proud of.

What If We Always Had the Right Words?

We all have ideas, but to articulate them? It’s tough. But imagine. Imagine writing a letter to your first crush that made them blush. Imagine writing a college essay with power words that hit like bricks and netted you a scholarship. Imagine writing a poem with the perfect rhymes, the imagery, and could convey your ideas seamlessly to listeners.

Here’s a fact about language speakers: we all more or less know our entire language. You have the same words as the president and a pop star. But the unique way each of us puts them together is what makes us, us. It’s why Chat-GTP can just mimic any person’s personality: it has access to all the words and all our unique patterns of speech, so mimicry is as easy as asking it to do so.

If we always had the right words? Well, I don’t think it would be so bad, actually. Actually, despite bringing up Chat-GTP, and I know for my fellow writers a fear may be aroused, of its neigh-inevitable snatching of our careers etc., I don’t think writing would become boring like AI prompts have become for me. (I mean, seriously, so what if it can write a description? Even if I got writer’s block and my own sentence came out sucky, at least I’d get a sense of accomplishment.)

If we always had the right words, it would be like becoming Usain Bolt. Do you think he got bored of running after he became the fastest man alive? Did he dive into a bowl of Cheetos and say “aight, I’m done now.” No! In fact, the fact that he’s excellent gives him more to work with. He can enjoy the moment of his sport and find new ways to perform—new challenges to do or places to sprint.

If we always had the right words, we would write beauty, frustration, curiosity. We would write about things we want to know and we would write about what we knew but had forgotten. We would write and feel accomplishment with each sentence, with each word. But allow me to backtrack. Because there are no right words.

Ever write a cover letter for a job? I know, I hate them too. When I write a cover letter, I often think about my word choice. It’s not enough for me to summarize where I’ve worked and why I want a new opportunity. To stand out from other job candidates, I have to write something compelling. I need a sentence that hooks the reader in immediately, and then I need sentences that can carry the momentum. A comma splice would break the magic.

And in my annoyance devising the perfect cover letter, I often think, “in all the parallel universes that may exist, some version of me has written the exact right words that the person reading this will want to hear, and that version of me is guaranteed the job.” But would it be the perfect cover letter? …No. Because someone else reading that same “perfect” cover letter may not like the writing style. Maybe the sentences are too short. And maybe a third person is okay with the sentences but may want more metaphors.

Sentence variation and metaphors are objective qualities. There’s no good or bad with them, only preferences— something that humans have. Plus, what one reader likes one day may be completely different another day, simply because of their mood.

The right words are the words that are right for you. And even that changes over time.

What are your thoughts on word choice in prose? Do you have an idea of how sentences are made? And what would you create if you could write “perfect” sentences? Tell me down below, and seeya next time 🙂

The Perfect Gift

~ Jamal H. Goodwin Jr. ~ Leave a comment

“Dude: me and Karey, rappeling down a cliff, blasting Earth Wind & Fire out these speakers.”

“… and that’s your idea of a relaxing Valentine’s day?”

It was Shawn I was talking to, so I couldn’t be miffed at the reaction. A windy spring day, leaves loosed from trees brushed across his cheek or afro; his mouth remained agape. I rose from my reclined posture, patting my hands on my knees. He won’t win this lecture.

“We’ve been hiking like a bajillion times by now. She’s been saying it’s too easy, and she wants to ramp it up.”

“Really?” Shawn said. “She’s been with you hiking that much?”

“Yeah, we—”

“OK. Let’s say she has, pal of mine. She’s still. Scared. Of. Heights.” He made chopping scissor fingers and lowered his hand to the ground. “That’s you by the way. She’d push you off before going down herself.”

“She would not. She loves me.”

“And for what reason, I do not know.”

“Because I saved her life, I’m great at directions, I cook mean meatloaf.”

“Oh alright. You are a good cook at least. My wife’s been begging me to become your student. She still can’t get over those steaks…”

“Whoa-ho-ho! Has my guy finally left the souless salad side of vegetarianism?”

“Fat chance, moo murderer.”

“You’ll come around, someday,” I said. I turned to the corner and picked my new speakers off the bench. “Anyway, wise guy, what do you think I should do for Karey next week?”

“Anything that doesn’t involve those speakers. Unless you’re playing smooth jazz.”

“Yuck, that’s what she likes.” A woman walking by rolled her eyes as she passed me.

“Well if you’re tryna marry her someday you better get used to making sacrifices.”

“Yeah yeah.” I said and shrugged. But deep down I knew he was right. Karey and I started dating five years ago, and it took two years of friendly prodding for her to dip her toes into my lifestlye: I took her on her first hike. We’ve been on several since; she loves it. It would be rude of me to not give her world a try.

“Will that be the red or the white wine,” a waiter might ask us. I’d sweat profusely. What’s the difference? And you can’t say “I’ll take a beer” in the restaurants Karey likes.

“She’s been dealing with nasty costumers all week,” Shawn said. Her shoulders likely ache from hunching over at that receptionist desk all day. She needs… a massage. Or a sauna. Go with her, try both!”

“I dunno if I can sit still for so long while somebody’s touching me.”

“Make some jokes. She’ll be right next to you, you’ll forget about your surroundings.”

“What if I forget to hold in my farts?”

Shawn slapped both palms to his face. “Man, man, man… you’re hopeless.”