Welcome to the forty-third of our Creative Challenges. WriteMovies’ 100-Day Creative Challenge 43 is about style in writing.
Guidance: For the next 20 minutes, use whatever method you like – thoughts and ideas, mind maps, diagrams or sketches, a sample of script, prose, poetry – as you prepare a creative piece, about:
Someone who would love to be speaking or writing in an extravagant way, who is trapped in a job that forces them to be boring instead!
- As you work through this task, you might also consider how this activity relates to style in writing.
- Save or photograph your work as a document called “100DayCC43”. Then reflect on this experience and what it has taught you about you and your writing: what comes naturally to you, which aspects were easy and difficult, and the subjects, angles and attitudes that you like to focus your writing on.
- Share online if you like using the hashtag #100DayCC43 to compare to other people’s experiences and support each other, or submit to our Academy Lite if you’re a subscriber!
When you complete the Challenge – or if you get completely stuck – then look at the Feedback below!
Feedback:
Style is about the mix of qualities the writing has for the audience to recognize. Examples: you can vary the levels of pace, humour, energy, surprise, wit, etc much more in some stories than others! Narration needs its own style, and so does every character or voice. Meanwhile you may also have to successfully emulate the style of other formats or media, such as news reports or church sermons, in order to convincingly realize some of the passages of your story.
So this Challenge encourages you to contrast two styles of communication, within one person. I bet every doctor, pastor or politician wishes they could just tell people what they really think of them sometimes! And, if you’re writing within a formalized, institutionalized setting such as a hospital or a courtroom, it’s hard to ensure that every character sounds genuinely different from each other, without behaving inappropriately or implausibly for the context and role they’re living or working in.
General tips and feedback:
Many writers, naturally, don’t find it easy to be creative ‘on tap’ – especially for work that they didn’t set themselves. But to write professionally, you will usually need to meet deadlines and requirements, that can’t be put off, for briefs you didn’t choose for yourself: even if you’re ill or feeling down, you’ll usually have to just find a way through, and get the results that are needed, to the quality that’s necessary. So the WriteMovies Creative Challenges are designed to help you find ways around the crucial issues of ‘block’.
We do this by setting a (deceptively!) simple brief, and encouraging you to use a variety of methods, approaches and creative products in order to find ways around it, and generate some kind of outcomes that might be useful to you in the future. Whatever state your mind and mood are in – energetic or tired, stimulated or bored, motivated or disengaged, etc – there are different ‘modes’ of creative productivity which you can engage, to make the best of it: editing your work if you can’t write, making notes if you can’t generate script, etc. Try a mix of methods to make the most of activities such as the Creative Challenges, especially anytime you get stuck: just keep adding notes, sketches etc freely, you can decide later whether any of them are useful! Also note that the brief is to ‘prepare’ a creative work – not to actually make it straight away, before you feel ready to! But if you’ve come away from this with a passage of prose or script or even poetry, well done!
Hopefully this activity will have shown you the potential value of our Creative Challenges, and the benefits of making a routine to complete them, and persisting with it day by day to gradually improve all aspects of your writing and to develop solutions to ‘block’, that you will become more and more proficient with over time. We recommend that you commit to fulfilling the 100-Day Creative Challenges, sharing your outputs to gain the support and feedback of other writers working on the same activities, and if you’d like expert daily feedback from us on this and much more, additional material, subscribe to the WriteMovies Academy Lite now!