• The Alps are jagged stone monsters that tear the sky open and brush the atmosphere with their icy crowns.

• A single ridge from this mountain range holds enough crushing snow and infinite rock to bury whole empires without leaving a trace.

The point of this example is that describing something like the Alps is to describe the obvious. Hyperbole, though, is not required:

• The jagged granite peaks of the Alps reach into the highest air, topped with thick, perpetual ice.

• Sharp granite spires rise straight into the clear upper sky, capped with year-round ice that glints in the sun.

• The high granite peaks stand cut against the sky, covered in heavy, permanent ice.

Similarly, describing extraordinary features on an unusual man allows you freedom. Let’s use Cillian Murphy (star of Oppenheimer) as an example.

• His translucent blue eyes burn with an intensity so blinding they could scorch a hole through a tungsten wall from three miles away.

• He possesses a jawline so impossibly sharp it could slice a diamond clean in half with a single turn of his head.

Is that over the top? Of course it is. Somehow it’s also true, sort of. Hyperbole does that.

And, again, someone with unusual features does not require strong observational skills.

What if where you are looking is more plain, and the person you are writing about is the epitome of average?

How do you describe that person without falling into cliché hyperbole of blandness, or forcing your reader to fall asleep?

This becomes the opposite of the extraordinary. Observational skills are required, attuned with a sense of detail.

The first thing you need to remember is that your mundane scene is not necessarily mundane to your reader. That cornfield that you’ve seen a thousand times driving through the Midwest, the one that goes for miles before you get to a gas station?

That’s fascinating to a person who has never seen corn. Having lived in a community that was surrounded by corn and soy fields, after having grown up in a suburb next to a major metropolitan city, I personally find cornfields fascinating. And to help put myself through college, I worked in a grain elevator that processed soybeans. I grew to appreciate that mundanity by experiencing it up close.

That boring-looking person? If you grew up in the outskirts of Minneapolis, you might see a lot of blonde people. Norwegian, Swedish, German, and so on. If you were among those people, those people would seem exceedingly boring inasmuch as they are family and friends. Minnesota—including the outer suburbs and rural areas surrounding the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area—has one of the highest concentrations of blonde hair in North America. Sure, you’ve got a few anomalies like Prince and Bob Dylan, but traditionally you’re looking at blondes, blondes, and more blondes.

Let’s think about an imaginary woman named Sarah. She could be your main character.

• Her cheeks radiate a rosiness so blindingly luminescent they could guide a lost cargo ship through a thick Great Lakes fog.

• She wears a fleece jacket woven with a fiber density so thick it could comfortably withstand the freezing thermal conditions of deep outer space.

• Her bright, sun-bleached hair shines with a radiance so brilliant it instantly melts every lingering drift of snow within a fifty-mile radius of her path.

Does she really look like that? Yes and no. Her cheeks might be rosy, and that’s partly in contrast to the fact that she has lighter skin than, say, someone who’s Italian. Plus, you can add in the fact that it’s colder up that far north. Rosy cheeks are just part of living there, but they aren’t part of living everywhere. Not to this extreme.

I’ve worked in a reference to the Great Lakes. Lake Superior is connected to Minnesota. That roots it in a real place. It helps build the visual.

Let’s rethink that without hyperbole. You don’t necessarily need to hit the reader hard with stereotypes.

• Bright rosy cheeks instantly warm her face, giving her the classic look of someone who thrives in crisp Northern air.

• She wears a heavy fleece jacket tailored to keep out the chill during long Minnesota winters without sacrificing style.

• Her sun-bleached blonde hair catches the midday light, offering a vibrant burst of color against the stark Midwestern backdrop.

You’ve described her straightforwardly. It’s kind of boring, but why? Everything there is accurate, natural, and relatable. It’s not terribly specific, and it could describe any generic Scandinavian woman living in Minnesota. You don’t want to overplay that genericism, but work through it and find your character within her. The story isn’t about her blond hair or her rosy cheeks. It is about how she laughs at inappropriate times, the way she’s underestimated as cop, or the fact that she just invented a method to see five minutes into the future. It’s about how she’s missing an eyebrow, loves Lightnin’ Hopkins (as one should), or speaks Japanese fluently.

If you’re writing a novel or even a short story, you’ll have other ways of describing Sarah. You’ll do this as she interacts with other characters, which will provide complement and contrast, and how she exists within the story.

We’ll learn about her voice, her mannerisms, and the kinds of things she says. Depending on the story, her location will also tell us a lot. For example, if she’s a teacher, you’ll talk about how she’s in front of the room teaching whatever the subject is. If she’s a corporate executive, you can describe her office or a cubicle.

Your mundane character is both amazing and relatable. If you remember the old TV show Gilligan’s Island, you might remember Mary Ann Summers. Her character, prior to being shipwrecked, worked at the fictitious Winfield General Store located in the very real Winfield, Kansas. In the ensemble cast, she was directly contrasted against the character Ginger Grant (the movie star). Ginger was aloof and subtly arrogant. Mary Ann was the girl next door.

How boring was Mary Ann? She came across as a small-town girl, an ingénue, in the context of the show, one of the most popular characters. She wasn’t boring because she was like us. Relating to the other characters might be difficult: the movie star, the professor who knew everything, the business magnate and his wife, the tour boat captain, or the accident-prone first mate.

Granted, the eccentric cast of Gilligan’s Island worked wonderfully together, but Mary Ann is the one we related to. She gave the characters realistic balance and kept the show from becoming a circus. Sure, even though it was a ridiculous setup for a sitcom, we still needed that so-called boring character.

No single characteristic brought us to love Mary Ann. The writers slowly slipped in where she grew up, her homespun persona, her domestic skills, and her down-to-earth perspective, one episode at a time. She could bake without an oven, manage the agricultural needs of the castaways, and mediate difficulties between Hollywood divas and the ultra-rich. Ginger, as a result, became even more glamorous.

How can you sprinkle in that ordinariness in an extraordinary circumstance to help make your character or situation fascinating?

Similarly, we look at Radar O’Reilly on M*A*S*H. He could have been Mary Ann, lacking the debonair wit and intelligence of Hawkeye and the others. He, however, was arguably the brains of the operation. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake, and later, Colonel Sherman T. Potter, counted on him. He had an incredible ear for incoming helicopters, could predict the needs of his supervisors and what kind of papers required signing. Was he ordinary?

Ordinary people are never ordinary. You need the observational skills to highlight what makes them extraordinary. The plot and setting of your story, as well as the other characters, will accomplish that. So many of our heroes are ordinary people who stepped up to do something amazing. Whether it’s a simple woodsman in the Grimms’ version of Little Red Riding Hood, or Frodo Baggins (or Sam Gamgee), your most interesting characters may not be the most flamboyant or unusual.

You can apply this to screwdrivers, paper, suburban houses, instant coffee, and anything else that you might think is intrinsically ordinary. Is it only a screwdriver, or does it have the duty of helping a carpenter? Is it just a piece of paper, or was it handmade by a man who has been a hermit in the forest for a decade? That suburban house carries within it the lives and culture of that unique family. The instant coffee? That’s what a truck driver uses while he’s on the road and needs a pick-me-up. Everything is interesting, but you need to see it for more than it is and simultaneously exactly what it is.

One Paragraph Prompt

Look around your desk. Maybe there’s a shelf right next to you. Grab something random and seemingly ordinary. Write an interesting paragraph about it without using hyperbole as if your audience were a 10-year-old child who might be unfamiliar with why that item is important.

A Not Funny Joke

What did the Professor say when he finally fixed the radio using two coconuts, a palm frond, and a vine?

“Great, now we can listen to the weather report telling us we’re stranded.”

(It helps if you’ve actually seen Gilligan’s Island.)

Buy: What Would Mary Ann Do?: A Guide To Life

Great Job!

You’ve made it this far. I’m happy. I’d love for you to share this post with a friend who is eager to write well.

Now, could you do me a favor? It’s 100% free. Follow my author page on Facebook. There is an array of photos, short articles, original writing, and discussion about art and music. It’s generally meme-free.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And as writer, I get to buy mint chocolate chip malts. If you've never had one, then you don't know. Go get yourself one. And click through and buy something from Amazon so I can do it too.

The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.

What a way to begin a book! It’s calm, careful, and even sensual. That’s from Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws. The movie starts differently. It opens underwater, on the fish’s own point of view, with two notes doing the work the camera refuses to do. Then it cuts to a bonfire on the shore. Chrissie, a young woman, smiles at a young man named Tom, and he follows her down to the water. She quickly decides that a midnight swim is required and proceeds to disrobe and run into the water. Tom is eager to follow, and tries, but he’s too inebriated. A minute later, she’s fish food.

Fifty years on, most people going into either the book or the movie know more or less what’s going to happen, and the tension increases. You know she’s going to get it, but you can’t help being nervous for her.

That’s how the story begins. As with any story, outside of those wibbly-wobbly avant-garde ones, it also has a middle and an end.

The shark gets the girl, and then a few more people. The town argues about what an appropriate response looks like. A decision finally gets made, and a small team goes out to take down the shark.

Your story has all of that, doesn’t it? So why does the middle of your draft feel swampy?

You’ve got a three-act structure, but your second act just isn’t working. It slogs through what could be an exciting, intriguing section.

Why?

The three-act structure is a proportional system — roughly a quarter, a half, a quarter — with two hinges. There’s a fair chance that your draft doesn’t have either hinge.

As we examine this, we’re going to look through the lens of the movie Jaws. From here on I am working from the film, not the novel. The two diverge, and they diverge hardest at the end. If you haven’t seen the movie, go to your favorite streamer and see if you can find it. I saw it in the theater as a kid, and I became convinced that Mrs. Kirk’s pool next door had sharks. It’s that good (or Mrs. Kirk wasn’t the nice lady I thought she was).

We’ll do it act by act. Keep reading.

Read more

As we begin, put on your best black frock coat. If you have one (and I hope you do), wear a stovepipe hat. Step up to a magnificent lectern, take off your hat and begin.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Abraham Lincoln said that on November 19, 1863. It’s the opening to The Gettysburg Address.

Read that sentence out loud a couple of times. Give it a little drama as you do. Try to sound presidential.

Delicious, isn’t it? It’s a 30-word sentence, longer than most of the ones you’ll be writing. It has three commas. There’s a lot going on there. And it sounds wonderful.

Read more

Have you read The Wizard of Oz? Here’s the story in a nutshell:

Dorothy Gale, a young girl swept from her Kansas home by a tornado, lands in the magical land of Oz and sets out along the Yellow Brick Road to ask the Wizard for a way home. Guided by her journey and joined by three colorful companions seeking missing virtues, she overcomes threats from the Wicked Witch of the West while helping her friends discover their own inner strengths. Ultimately, Dorothy realizes that the power to return home was within her all along, returning to Kansas with a renewed appreciation for her family and place in the world.

Luke Skywalker... Do I need to rehash his initial tale in Star Wars: A New Hope? Pshaw! Go see it on Disney or buy a copy on Amazon. It’s one of those movies you should know.

OK, OK, here’s the dime store version:

Read more

During COVID, I learned to make Yorkshire pudding, red wine sauce, several different ways of making chicken and beef, and numerous coffee and espresso brewing techniques.

I watched the videos, got the ingredients, and then made the thing.

During that time, I watched hundreds more videos of things I never made but wanted to.

I take it as a partial success. Gordon Ramsay isn’t going to be calling me for tips, but I have a few new recipes in my arsenal.

As I’m writing, I have a Billy Parisi video running for roasted chicken. I’ve saved it. Will I actually make it?

Read more

Work with me here. And, no, Fred isn’t involved in this. I just used his name in the title because of the band. Their famous song has nothing to do with this article.

It’s the same old, same old, “He said, she said.”

Not us, though. We’re writers. We love big words and we know how to use them.

We writers might’ve said said better. “He expounded, she retorted.”

That’s efficient, isn’t it?

How did he expound? Did she calmly retort? I dare say not!

Let’s try that again. “He expounded arrogantly, she retorted furiously.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Still, there is so much left unsaid. What more could be said?

“He expounded arrogantly with eyes declaring his family heritage, and she retorted furiously as her nose flared in anger.”

Or did they?

I said it, so, in the context of the story, it must be true.

Wait, there’s more.

Read more

That seemed like a good idea… except it wasn’t.

The Biggs respond by bringing in a cat, and the cat turns out to be a worse problem than the mice. Tom survives it by taming the cat himself, on the theory that if big people can live alongside cats, so can little ones. By the time the Biggs return, order is restored.

When I read this in third grade, I was fascinated by the idea of other worlds. In a sense, John Peterson created an alternate universe. Or rather a secret one existing within ours, overlapping our lives the way an insect’s world does.

The Little family (Mr. and Mrs. Little, Tom, Lucy, Uncle Pete, and Granny Little) were only a few inches tall. They went completely unseen by the humans. The symbiosis existed only because the Little family set it up.

The rest almost writes itself from the premise. What kind of conflicts would tiny people in a big house run into? Mice, for a start. To someone three inches tall, a mouse is a monster. Clear the mice, and the cat brought in to hunt them becomes the next danger. That chain is predictable. Peterson’s way out of it is not. The obvious rescue would be a friendly dog running the cat off, the way a dog saves the mouse in Tom and Jerry. Peterson skips the dog and has the smallest character on the page befriend the biggest threat. The premise hands you the conflict. The choice about how it resolves is where the writing actually happens.

Read more

• What would The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne look like if written in 1950 as opposed to the first part of the 17th century?

• What would The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway look like if it was set in central Illinois?

• What would The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck look like if set in 2026 in Southern Wisconsin?

Each of those stories would require substantial changes, but some of the core things could remain.

In The Scarlet Letter, it could be seen as a story of discrimination. Hester Prynne wore an embroidered letter A on her clothing to remind others of her adulterous behavior, while simultaneously reminding Hester of her sin. If it was set in the 1950s, we would need to do some easy things like update her name to something more contemporary. More importantly, we might choose to force her to wear a Jewish star, the Star of David. That would not be because of a sinful choice, but because of racial prejudice against Jews. Because that was part of actual history in certain communities, we would be telling Hester’s story very intimately knowing it was part of a larger historiographical truth.

Read more

One struggle a lot of fiction writers have is that all of their characters sound more or less the same. They should do more than move the plot or act as sounding boards for each other. For them to come alive, you need to give them the attributes of the living.

You have three basic categories of characters: protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters. In other words, the good guys, the bad guys, and everybody else.

Below, I have created some lists on how to develop those characters. These things will be easier to apply to longer pieces of fiction. With a short story, your lead characters are more symbolic and less fully developed. But if you have 150 pages, you’ve got some space to move around.

If you’re feeling lazy and want to skip the next 1,000 words or so, here the short version: Make them interesting human beings. Make them complicated, not just cookie-cutter good or bad. Avoid stereotypes, etc.

If you want to improve your writing, fight off that laziness and keep reading. If not, enjoy these pictures of baseballs from my childhood.

10 Tips for Developing a Protagonist

1. Give Them a Clear Desire

Read more

Are you organized as a writer?

If you were asked to write a book right now, would you be ready?

In other words, do you have all your ducks in a row?

Let’s get down to business. I know things distract you. I kno…

Read more

You might be thinking that that is essentially what an outline does. Yes, but no. Your outline will include things like establishing voice and setting. Those are important, but an outline is more about the structural blueprint. It’s a framework. A plot point, on the other hand, is a point along a line. The line is your story from beginning to end. Your outline will capture all of that, but it’s helpful to know the plot points to ensure that your story makes sense to your readers.

Read more

The itsy-bitsy spider had found its way to our wall by doing something called ballooning. When it hatched, it shot out a small filament—the tiniest thread of its webbing. Because the spider was so small, not much bigger than a bit of dust, it blew where the wind took it.

And it landed.

It built a tiny web.

It ate some tiny little no-see-ums. Lots of those. Here in the South, we appreciate that greatly.

And it grew. Its web was a smidge bigger.

It ate

Read more

I’m going to focus on that this week. If you apply what Twain says, your writing will improve exponentially.

Those of you who were English majors like myself probably read this as an undergraduate. Even still, it’s good to go back to. And if you are an accountant or a lawyer, and were never an English major, this should be helpful.

Nowadays, a lot of literary criticism is resented by very smart unpublished people. Or very smart aleck unpublished people. Or not so smart published people. Or just people who whine a lot and happen to make a living doing so. Twain had by this time already published the books that have since lasted the test of time, like “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” That list goes on.

Read more

Have you read Kurt Vonnegut? He was a writer’s writer. Not only did he write excellent fiction that has stood the test of time, but he knew how he did what he did and how to teach this to the rest of us.

• Slaughterhouse Five

• Breakfast of Champions

• Cat’s Cradle

I’m going to quote him quite directly and hope that he serves as a great teacher to you as well.

Vonnegut called the following “Creative Writing 101” from the preface to his short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box. Anyone who’s been to college knows that 101 refers to the first class you take on the way to taking much more difficult courses, but without this foundation, you won’t benefit from the 200-level courses and beyond.

Read more

Have you ever heard the phrase, “He stabbed the guy in the back”? Depending on the context, either somebody did stab the guy in the back or somebody betrayed somebody else. Occasionally, in our current knee-jerk monocular society, someone will actually not understand it is a metaphor. I’m here to help you through what you missed in fifth grade.

Read more

I have a video bird feeder open in my browser. It is 4:45 a.m. and still dark, but I’m hoping to see a deer or an opossum. Birds won’t show up until after 7:00 a.m.

I’m having a lungo, an espresso-based drink. So, I’m wired even though I didn’t sleep well. I am sleepy and buzzed. It’s an odd feeling.

I’m streaming music on Spotify, but I can’t decide between my playlist “High Energy ’80s and Beyond” and some Perry Como.

Oh, wait. Michael Sembello’s song, “Maniac” (from Flashdance) is on. I have the lyrics window open, “Cold, kinetic heat.” Huh. I always thought it was coconetic key, which I never understood. Totally makes sense now.

Read more

When I write speeches, I write for the ear as well as the mind. I tell people I write theater, not speeches. After all, the speaker is not reading a white paper. T…

Read more

Dr. Zaius had allowed them to escape down the coastline into the unknown. An average writer would have just allowed Taylor and Nova to proverbially ride off into the sunset onto some new adventure. They would be Adam and Eve-type characters rebuilding human society, like at the end of Anthem by Ayn Rand. Or not. That’s the thing with the unknown. You just don’t know. Well, if you don’t count the four sequels.

The writer, however, chooses to give it a serious twist.

421 THE STRANGE FORMATION - AS SEEN BY TAYLOR

An immense column juts from the beach at a thirty-degree angle. We can now see that it is not rock, but metal. Green metallic tints show through its gray salt-stained surface. As we draw closer, the object takes on the appearance of a massive arm, its top shaped like a hand holding a torch.

If you’ve seen the movie, there’s no surprise in what they’re seeing. For the audience, however, it was an unexpected visual. That audience could only understand things frame-by-frame, in step with Taylor and Nova.

In fact, Nova had no idea what the Statue of Liberty was all about. Taylor knew it by sight and by name, as well as its significance. It wasn’t part of her history. Those days were long forgotten generations long ago.

422 REVERSE ANGLE - FAVORING TAYLOR

Frowning with consternation. His horse proceeds at a slow walk.

423 TRACKING WITH TAYLOR - WHAT HE SEES:

Near the base of the column, where the shore and water meet, are a row

of metal spikes. From this angle they look like tank traps.

Taylor is trying to process what he’s seeing. He’s not predicting what will be implausible yet possible. He’s trying to predict the plausible.

What is plausible?

The entire movie was about him adjusting to being thrown into a time two millennia after the one he was born in. Everything that wasn’t plausible was true: apes ran society, humans were caged, and all of human history was essentially forgotten.

A-423 CLOSER - TAYLOR

Dumbfounded, he slides from his saddle, approaches the spikes. Nova dismounts and follows him.

TAYLOR

(a cry of agony)

My God!

He falls to his knees, buries his head in his hands. CAMERA SLOWLY DRAWS BACK AND UP to a HIGH ANGLE SHOT disclosing what Taylor has found. Half-buried in the sand and washed by the waves is the Statue of Liberty.

The big reveal. Who expected the Statue of Liberty? Nobody in the theaters thought that in 1968, that’s for sure. I certainly didn’t when I was 7 years old watching it on Channel 2 in Chicago. As a second grader, I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of the scene. The Statue of Liberty represents so many things that it was the perfect choice for the writer. Taylor and Nova could have gone with some other iconic landmark that is close or en route to the ocean, like the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge. None of them carries the symbolic weight, however, that the Statue of Liberty does.

For Taylor, there were some added components to the symbolism. It represented freedom from the apes, but he was still trapped in this time. Freedom is complicated.

Visually, it’s a fairly simple scene. In the greater context of the movie, the audience is surprised.

Spaceships were relatively new to us then. Comic books talked about them, but we wouldn’t actually walk on the moon until 1969. We didn’t know what really happens when someone goes into space and we certainly didn’t know what going into space under the context that the 4 astronauts did at the beginning of the movie.

It’s more than deus ex machina. Literally translated as “god from the machine,” the phrase refers to a plot device where a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. That’s not what happened in Planet of the Apes.

The world the astronauts left in 1972 was the same one you know (more or less, as this is a fictionalized version). When they landed, humans were subjugated and dominated in 3978. A lot had happened in 2,006 years.

When we think about the plausibility of the scene, we know that the astronauts landed in the water somewhere. The specifics are left a mystery by the writer in order to set up for the big ending. However, whatever happened that led to the current circumstances must have been catastrophic. Moreover, whatever was left of the human civilization had fallen into archeological ruin. We already know Cornelius had archeological remains of a non-ape civilization.

That Taylor and Nova would find this was implausible but not impossible.

My favorite books and movies are the ones in which I cannot predict what is happening. I want to be surprised. I want the writer to feel challenged not to have taken the predictable route, riding off into the sunset, but to show me something that fits better.

I don’t mean stories that rely on red herrings or those where the writer intentionally fools me. I mean where the writer creates an impossible situation that seems to have no resolution, but then the writer creates the perfect resolution where all things come together not in a ridiculous way, but a satisfying one.

Books

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie — Christie’s masterpiece. She expertly navigates many whodunnits, but this one takes it to another level. It remains satisfying because it adheres strictly to the "fair play" rule of detective fiction—all the clues are present, yet the identity of the killer remains elusive until the epilogue.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — While it begins as a traditional Gothic romance, the narrative shifts when the truth about the title character, the deceased Rebecca, is revealed. It upends the “haunted by a saint” trope in favor of a much darker reality.

Movies

Psycho — Alfred Hitchcock famously mandated that no one be let into the theater after the movie started. Why? To take them somewhere other than expected. It kills off its “main” character (the decoy protagonist) only 47 minutes into the film, forcing the audience to restart the story with a new lead.

The Sixth Sense — Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment in prime form. Once the truth about Malcolm Crowe (Willis) is revealed, the satisfaction comes from realizing that every previous scene was carefully constructed to hide the truth in plain sight. M. Night Shyamalan brilliantly wrote himself into a situation that seemed to have no resolution.

What Now?

Take the risk. Create a story in which the characters don’t seem to have a fix to their problem… then, fix it in a way no one expects.

It has to be unexpected, but not impossible.

Four Sentence Story Prompt

Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward into writing yourself out of a corner.

A research expedition discovers a perfectly preserved, 18th-century clockwork automaton buried in a layer of Antarctic ice that has been sealed for 30 million years. Upon being thawed, the machine begins ticking and uses its internal brass cylinders to accurately transcribe the private thoughts of the lead scientist in real-time. The protagonist realizes the machine is not recording his mind, but is actually a physical manifestation of the script the scientist is currently trapped within. To stop the machine from revealing a fatal secret in the next sentence, he must find a way to break the internal gears without using any action that a writer could describe in text.

A Not Funny Joke

Two chimpanzees were sitting in a clearing, hunched over a well-worn copy of War and Peace.

One chimpanzee turned to the other and asked, “Is it a comedy or a tragedy?”

The second chimpanzee looked up from the page and replied, “It’s a tragedy. He hasn’t mentioned a single banana in 1,200 pages.”

Is that you?

Or are you the parent who tries to squeeze in 30-minutes of writing after the kids have gone to bed and your spouse has come back from the grocery store.

Writers have a distinct freedom all other art forms do not: We only need a computer. Sure, you could be like Legal Pad Scooby. Or like the accountant who has a fantasy novel in her. Or the high school baseball coach who has a great novel idea about a dance troupe.

Check out these writers who worked completely outside of that of a professional writer and are now part of the canon. I’m listing more than a token few because I want you to see the range of writers and their jobs. You could be on this list, no matter what you do for a living.

• Agatha Christie, pharmacy assistant and nurse

• Anne Rice, insurance claims examiner

• Bram Stoker, business manager for a theater

• Charles Bukowski, postal clerk

• Charlotte Brontë, governess and teacher

• Franz Kafka, insurance officer

• Harper Lee, airline reservation agent

• Herman Melville, customs inspector

• Lewis Carroll, mathematics lecturer

• Louisa May Alcott, civil war nurse, laundress, seamstress

• Margaret Atwood, barista

• Maya Angelou, streetcar conductor, cook, dancer

• Octavia Butler, potato chip inspector, dishwasher, telemarketer

• T.S. Eliot, banker

• Wallace Stevens, insurance executive

• William Carlos Williams, pediatrician

• Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist

I said that all we need is a computer. That’s not true. We also need that idea that needs to be written. We need time and a willingness to use that time to write.

When William Carlos Williams wrote poetry, he treated neighborhood children as a pediatrician. “The Red Wheelbarrow” only has 16 words and no punctuation, and yet, it nails how important a humble farm tool is.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white chickens 

You might say, “Sure, Williams started as a doctor, but he wrote full time after that.” Nope. He stayed a doctor. Maybe that's because being a pediatrician paid better than being a poet. To paraphrase Steve Martin, “Nobody ever says, ‘Look, there goes the poet in his new Lamborghini!’”

Or he loved helping children. That’s good too.

The poem was published in 1923 as part of his collection Spring and All. In 1924, he became the chief of pediatrics at Passaic General Hospital. That’s about as real of a job as it gets. He worked hard. He retired in 1951 only because of the result of a stroke.

Persona

It’s not just about the job. It’s also about persona. Legal Pad Scooby projects a neo-bohemian affectation. He represents the stereotype of a coffeehouse poet.

I once exchanged several emails with Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire, and had a net worth of $60 million when she died in 2021. Nothing in her email said, “I’m a rich, famous, and occasional controversial writer.” She came off as a human being, authentic, and modestly confident. She even had at least one typo. I’m sure she knew receiving emails from her was a thrill for another writer, but she never showed it.

No Just About New York

It used to be if you wanted to publish The Great American Novel, Your book needed to find its way to New York City. This is because the publishers were there and with the publishers, the agents. Publishers did exist in other major cities, but NYC was for authors what Hollywood is for actors (though Atlanta and Mumbai have nicked heavily into that).

It’s true that New York is still a key place for publishers, but someone living in Ankeny, Iowa can still be published without ever leaving home.

The" “Big Five” publishers: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan—they are all in New York. You need find an agent who can live anywhere in the world. The traditional gatekeeping has leveled out. You do need find them, but there a combination of online and print resources they can send you in the right direction.

If you find that agent, it’s just a matter either emailing them or uploading your file to their website.

Sourcebooks, a strong outlier publisher, is based in a suburb just outside of Chicago. And like the rest, you can reach them through an agent.

That’s just six publishers. There are another 10 to 15 major publishers out there. Scholastic, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and W.W. Norton & Company, just for starters.

Break it down to the next level, and there are 400-600 mid sized publishers in the US. It depends how you count. If you are a reader, you’ve got their books on your shelf. Graywolf Press, Chronicle Books, Grove Atlantic, Algonquin Books, and Milkweed Edition, and so on. Add in micro-presses, and you can and maybe another 100,000. Yowza!

But wait! There’s more!

You’ve got the small presses as well. Well over 3,000 of those. That’s not counting the small presses which are functionally self publishing entities, like my own Tree Fort Books. Which brings us to…

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing used to be the realm of vanity publishing. It still can be, but it’s also become a legitimate part of the publishing world. They account for over two million new titles annually. And that’s just the ones with ISBNs. When you use Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), You can add in another couple of million titles.

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to best practices, but you can easily publishing using KDP.

How easy? Got Microsoft Word? That easy.

All you need to do is upload the file, and fill out a form. You’ll need a cover for your book, but that's easy enough to manage as well.

Making it excellent is not as easy, and convincing other people to buy it is a lot more work than some people realize. Be sure to do your homework to understand the pros and cons of self-pubbing. You want to look into the real costs, like editors, designers, and marketing.

But it is available to you and plenty of people have made careers out of publishing their own books.

So What?

The so what is that no matter who you are, you can write. Whatever you do for a living, whether you wear skinny jeans or a sun dress or a double breasted suit, whether you drink coffee, tea, or milk, whether you live in New York City or tiny town USA, whether you are making $20,000 or $200,000 a year, whether you are someone famous or someone unknown, whether you… whether anything. You can do it.

Two Sentence Story Prompt

Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward.

A single mother balances her shifts at the diner and the warehouse while scribbling plot points on the backs of discarded receipts. She discovers that the stories she writes in the breakroom begin to appear as headline news the very next morning.

A Not Funny Joke

The Novelist’s Coffee Shop: A writer spent six hours at a local café today. He managed to delete three commas and change a “the” to an “a.” He calls it a highly productive Tuesday.

In writing, hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses intentional and obvious exaggeration to emphasize a point, evoke strong feelings, or create a strong impression. It is not intended to be taken literally by the reader.

That sounds too academic. Let’s try it again.

Think of hyperbole as the “drama queen” of writing. It’s when a writer tells a massive, over-the-top lie to help the reader understand a very simple truth.

That’s about right.

No, It really isn’t the greatest invention the history of mankind. That would be the coffee maker. Anyone who’s had a cup of coffee today knows that is not hyperbole, but absolute truth.

It is a strange thing to say something so clearly untrue for the sake of helping the reader see, in a sense, the opposite.

I use hyperbole in speeches for the same reasons.

Examples

“I have no wind, if you want to know the truth. I’m quite a heavy smoker, for one thing—that is, I used to be. They made me quit. I smoked about five million cigarettes a month.”
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)

“A day was twenty-four hours long; but it seemed as if it would never end.”
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876)

“A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.”
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

"The constant dripping of the rain... sounded like a million little drums."
Babe: The Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith (1983)

Why It Works

Hyperbole creates contrast in the midst of a truth. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, smoked in excess, and that’s the truth he’s trying to impart. Did he smoke on average 161,290 cigarettes a day? No one thinks that. How many? That’s where it gets complicated.

When we use hyperbole, we fall into a kind of relativism. The reader imagines what counts as excess. I’m a non-smoker and always have been. I grew up in a home with two smoking parents. I endured a lot of second-hand smoke. For me, what counts as excess is lower than, say, what a pack a day smoker might think. They smoke 20 cigarettes a day for them, their starting point. What counts as excess must be significantly beyond 20 accordingly.

In the case of Holden Caulfield, his life was in extremes.

When the narrator in Babe: The Gallant Pig says, “The constant dripping of the rain... sounded like a million little drums,” It wasn't about extremes. It was about the poetics. The sensory feeling of rain dripping is both a matter of sound and feeling. The reader sense either, but the narrator is leading us to feel so much rain that were soaked and that the dripping so constantly that it’s just a wall of sound.

In both cases, it's about contrast, relativity and sameness.

Through exaggeration we can see how it's different than normal, whatever we define as normal, how same it is compared to our expectations.

Shock Me (and more)

They offer a little shock, causing the reader to think through what’s actually being said.

They also offer a chance to turn a phrase. Mark Twain writes, “A day was twenty-four hours long; but it seemed as if it would never end.” Anyone counting the hours recognizes it's already a long day. Most of us sleep through one third of it. How could be longer? Twain manages to get us to feel that length.

The Beatles sang,

Eight days a week
I love you.
Eight days a week
Is not enough to show I care.

Like Twain, they’ve exaggerated using days. They've added one. Just one. The singer is trying to declare how in love he is. An ordinary full day wasn't enough. As evidenced by the lyrics, eight days was not enough to get the job done either.

I Gotta Be Me

I grew up right next to Chicago. We have a particular way of speaking. Hyperboles are just part of the common parlance. Maybe some of these are used where you live as well.

• "The Kennedy is a parking lot."

• "The Bears haven't had a quarterback in a century."

• "They put a mountain of giardiniera on this."

• "It’s a thousand degrees below zero."

• "I’ve been looking for a parking spot since 1995."

• "I’ve been on the Red Line for an eternity."

When you are trying to write an authentic character, it's important to consider where they are from. Should you include the language the local people speak? It's important to the demographics correctly. People on the South side speak differently than on the north. Different things are important to them. Likewise, what's their socioeconomic status? Are they part of the University of Chicago World, or did they live closer to Marquette Park?

As you do, you'll want to avoid using too many of them so that it sounds like you're making them into a cartoon character like the SNL Superfans.

Be Funny

Humor isn’t always about the wit or one-liner. Colloquial phrasings are a great way to bring this in.

Think about the tall tales. How big was Paul Bunyan’s Blue Ox, Babe? It was “a beast so large that it took two men to see across one of his tracks.” That’s the take of Will H. Dilg, The DeKalb Daily Chronicle, 1925.

It isn’t merely that the writer wants the reader to imagine an ox that is especially large, but that it's ridiculously large.

Another writer, James MacGillivray, in 1906 tells us, between Babe’s horns, it measured "forty-two ax-handles and a plug of tobacco" (Oscoda Press). Using the unorthodox measuring tools makes sense because we're talking about lumberjacks, but adding the plug of tobacco just takes it another level. Let's not forget that the ox happens to be blue.

Paul Bunyan himself was so large that he used a Douglas Fir tree as a comb. Not just any fir tree. A Douglas fir tree.

A Little Dab'll Do Ya!

Do you remember the 1953 commercial for Brylcreem?

Brylcreem, a little dab'll do ya,
Brylcreem, you'll look so debonair.
Brylcreem, the gals'll all pursue ya;
They'll love to run their fingers through your hair!

You didn't a lot. You need it just enough to get the job done, and all the gals apparently would come running. The commercial naturally didn't tell you what would happen if you used a big glop of it.

It's the same thing with hyperboles.

Don't overdo it. You might find yourself laughing at your own work, but it's easy to exhaust the reader. You've got to ground your story with otherwise believable characters and contexts. If everything is hyperbole, then nothing is normal. If nothing is normal, hyperbole becomes normal. That's not good writing.

Think about your colorful characters and the things they say. Add a dash of hyperbole. Maybe two or three, maybe more depending on how long the story is.

Two Sentence Story Prompt

Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward, hyperbolically speaking.

The boy carried a stack of books so tall that it scraped the very clouds and made the moon jealous. He walked for a billion years just to find a single quiet spot where the silence was louder than a heavy metal concert.

A Not Funny Joke

Q: Why did the writer cross the road?

A: She was in the middle of a brutal essay revision, so she crossed the street to reorganize her spice rack, volunteer at the local animal shelter, and research the entire history of the 1904 World’s Fair.