A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Ninety-Two

As I have said before, there are times when I find myself sitting down to write a story without really having much of an idea for what I want to write.  In thinking about that, I have tried to come up with some strategies that I can use in responding to that lack of an idea.  One of the strategies I have found very helpful is one that I got from the memoirist Frank McCourt.  A number of years ago, I saw McCourt giving a talk and he was discussing his experiences as a teacher in the New York City public school system.  At one point he mentioned that he had a great deal of difficulty getting his students to write, until he told them that they could avoid handing in their written assignments if they wrote him a letter explaining there excuse.  He did not really care about the excuse, at least not in terms of plausibility or anything of that sort.  It was just a feint to get the students writing, and the resulting letters were often extremely inventive and showed a great deal of skill in their writing.  The thing is, it is always easy to come up with an excuse and that is enough for there to be a story, so often, I just try to write an excuse for why I can't write the story and the idea that arises is a good foundation for a story.  Indeed, so far, I haven't actually written one that I think sounds like me writing an excuse for not having written the story, but that is certainly an idea that I want to play with more directly one of these days.  It may be that I feel like, if I were to write that story it might dampen the magic of this technique in general.

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