Experimenting in Writing
Photo credit: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3rxotv
I'm going to tell you something, and you're going to have to try not to go into a convulsive seizure in shock: some writing is boring.
I don't know if people mean to make it boring or if it's just something that happens naturally, like how a flower blossoms or a Taylor Swift relationship ends in a catchy breakup song, but the why doesn't matter. It's what you can do about it.
Truth is, everyone writes boring stuff all the time, but you don't have to just sit there and let it be boring. Testing out different styles, using different strategies, and bringing in new whatever are all excellent ways to give your piece that extra boom boom firepower.
Let's start with a little perspective.
Perspective
Perspective has two parts: point of view (POV) and tense, or the who and the when. Let's start with the who. But not, like, the band The Who. Nobody listens to them anymore.
Like I said, point of view is all about who's doing the talking: you, me, Robert Downey Junior, etc. You've got a few options on this one:
First person: I did this. I did that. I ran over Kanye West's favorite mongoose with an ATV. We parked the ATV in the garage and didn't tell anyone.
Second person: You did this. You did that. You joined up with Nicolas Cage to steal the Declaration of Independence. (Note: Most people think reading things in this POV is annoying, which is why you don't see many full-length books written this way. Tread with care, but at the end of the day, it's your call.)
Third person: He did this. They did that. Hermione challenged Loki to a magician's duel.
What POV you choose determines what information you can tell people. In first person, you're limited to what the person telling the story knows and thinks. In third person, you have more options. You can use a close perspective, in which you pick one character and only use what she knows/thinks (e.g., She stared at him and couldn't help but remember that time he picked his nose in the middle of presentation.), or you can use omniscient, in which you know everything that everyone is doing and thinking (e.g., Henry went into the other room and screamed while Marie considered the merits of soundproofing material and Sage thought about the life cycle of sea turtles as discussed in Finding Nemo.)
Omniscient is less popular in creative writing because jumping around from person to person with nary a care in the world is distracting and confusing, kind of like using the word "nary". If you're writing something other than a narrative (read: story), omniscient is fine and dandy.
Some types of writing require a certain POV. Lots of science writing uses third person (absolutely no I's or you's), while things like autobiographies stick to first person. As far as I know, nothing requires second person. Second person is an awkward little thing that nobody quite understands or wants.
A visual representation of second person POV.
Actually, wait. How-to articles sometimes use second person. So there's that.
That said, don't be afraid to branch out. If the teacher or genre doesn't demand a certain POV, try out a new one. Used to writing first person? Switch to third. Heck, switch to second! That'll throw 'em for a loop; even Psyduck is useful in the right situations. You can also switch up the perspective. Who is talking? What would happen if somebody else were talking instead? What would that look like? Experiment a little. You are Bill Nye, and this is your lab.
The other part of perspective is when you're writing this, the tense: past, present, or future. Some genres prefer one tense over the other--in lab reports, for example, most teachers want past tense--but tense is more fluid than POV, and you're usually more free to mess around with it.
Changing the tense can affect how people read the piece and what you can say. If you're writing past tense, you can mention things that haven't happened yet because in your timeline, they have happened, so you already know about them.
Example:
Elsa smiled politely at Jack--Jack with the hoodie, with the staff, with the snowy hair--and bid him farewell. She had no inkling yet that he shared her blue thumb. It would be weeks before she found that out.
I ship Elsa x Jack Frost forever. I don't care; I won't apologize for it. I will apologize for how much that example sounded like bad fan fiction, though. Sorry. My bad.
In present tense, you can't explicitly talk about things that haven't happened yet except in the hypothetical. (Well, maybe this will happen, I think.) You can lay out the clues for the reader to put together on their own (see foreshadowing under Narrative Strategies), but that's as far as you can go. The plus side is that you can up the tension by using present tense in action scenes. Past tense sometimes takes that away; you know that the hero survived because he's still around to talk about it.
As far as future tense is concerned, just know that writers rarely use it for an entire piece because it's awkward and clunky and yuck. But again, mess around. If you want to use future tense, then use future tense. Who's going to stop you?
Read your work out loud to figure out what sounds best. People say to do that a lot, and that's because it works. Maybe I sounds better than she on paper, but out loud it just sounds weird. Better to figure stuff like that out now.
Come on, read it. You know you want to.
Voice
Believe it or not, you can make anything interesting if you say it in the right way. You can also make anything boring.
You could say that the kinds of vibrations measured on a Richter scale are caused by minute movements in the upper layers of the Earth, which are themselves caused by convection of heat in the supporting layers.... Or you could pull a tumblr:
Original photo: https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/2r998x/science_side_of_tumblr/
It all comes back to the voice, what you sound like when you write. Word choice, sentence structure and length, and even how you organize your thoughts all make up your voice. Each person has a default voice that they use--it's why a lot of your essays might sound kind of the same, even if they're about completely different things. My voice is a little snarky and sarcastic. Maybe you haven't noticed; it's pretty subtle.
The tone also feeds a lot into voice. Tone is the emotional theme of the piece--light, dark, depressing, oblivious, weird, scary. Writers usually pick the tone that best matches the subject (e.g., a somber tone for an article about increasing death rates), but you don't have to use that just because most people would. You can make something more interesting by giving it a tone that doesn't match the subject at all, like, I don't know, writing a humorous post about grammar. Grammar isn't funny. It's not even funny in an ironic way, but you can make anything funny if you cite Kanye West enough.
Tread with caution. Some subjects or teachers might not like it if you try to make a serious matter seem lighthearted. The type of piece makes a difference, too: Academic research papers might warrant a more austere approach to syntactical techniques, while a personal essay doesn't give a flying fruitcake whether or not it sounds professional. When in doubt, talk to your teacher. Teachers geek out hearing your ideas. Trust me, I've seen the geeking in action.
Narrative Strategies
There is no way for me to say "narrative strategies" so it doesn't sound awful, so let's just accept that it's an awful thing to say and move on with it.
A narrative strategy is pretty much any choice you make as a writer, including literally everything I've talked about up until this point, but these things are more small-scale, which is why they get their very own section. These strategies are more widely applicable in creative writing as opposed to research writing, though you can figure out a way to use them pretty much anywhere.
First up: messing with the timeline.
And another, because there are just so many great time travel references out there, and I am a slave to pop culture:
Original photo: http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/2609438/We#462b2f_2608994
I'll resist the urge to put a Dr. Who meme on here, too. You're welcome. Or I'm sorry, depending on your fandom.
Just because things happen in a certain order doesn't mean that you need to tell them in that order. You can put scenes or events in any order you like, as long as you make it clear when each is supposed to be happening. The book The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton alternates timelines. Every other chapter tells the story from the beginning to the middle, while the other chapters tell the story from the middle to the end. He lets you know when he's switching it up so you're not horribly confused, which is the only way doing something like this can work. Some stories are told completely in reverse. Some go in a mostly-normal order, but then suddenly jump backwards or forewards before bringing it back to the present.
Bringing past events into the present, or flashback, can be a powerful tool in a writer's arsenal. A flashback happens when the character sees/hears/smells/thinks something that reminds them of something that's already happened, and they recount that event as a short scene. The movie Forest Gump is told almost entirely in flashbacks.
Example:
I stare out the bus window as fields give way to buildings. We pass by the park with its purple slide and ancient swings.
The swings were still that day, the last time I was there. It was quiet, except for her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I can't do it. I can't love someone who doesn't play Pokemon GO."
"Pokemon GO is dead," I whispered. Just like our relationship.
In the same way, you can flashforward to show future events before they happen--I've seen shows flashforward to somebody standing at a grave several times before the person actually dies--but this isn't as common as flashback unless the character is a psychic.
Flashforward's cousin, foreshadowing, is much more common. Foreshadowing is when you hint at something that's going to happen. For example, if a person in a story walks into a room and mentions that there's a knife on the table, your brain automatically takes that to mean that somebody is going to use the knife eventually. A lot of times foreshadowing makes use of irony: A very young Bruce Wayne complains of being lonely, so Alfred says, "Hey, at least you're not an orphan." Guess what happens the next day? Ruh-roh, Batman.
Sometimes something happens that seems like it should be foreshadowing, but nothing ever comes of it. We in the business call this a red herring. Red herrings can be tiny--like if Alfred instead told Bruce, "Hey, at least you're not in boarding school,"--or they can be huge, like spending ten chapters investigating a character who really is as innocent as she claims.
There are about 8,675,309 other strategies that you can use (my favorite is breaking the fourth wall; thanks, Deadpool), but these are some of the most common and ain't nobody got time for that. In fact, ain't nobody got time for writing. Let's focus on what else you can use.
Pulling in a Bunch of Other Stuff
My professors have a bunch of fancy words to describe this, but I'm not going to use any of those words because you don't care and I don't care and if nobody cares, what's the point?
Just because writing is mostly words doesn't mean that's all it has to be. Don't be afraid to pull in other stuff, too--pictures, graphs, tables, screenshots. Depending on the medium, you can even insert videos and GIFs, like the Flash GIF above, which is probably my new favorite GIF of all time (at least for the next 45 seconds). Seeing something different on the page gives the reader a break and keeps them interested.
Double-check with your teacher to make sure it's okay to include these kinds of visual elements before you turn in the final draft, but as long as you have a good reason for including them, it's probably fine.
Actual footage of me bestowing GIFs upon unsuspecting (and unamused) audiences.
Mm, I still like the Flash one better.
The other stuff doesn't have to be visual, though. You can quote and borrow all sorts of text from other authors, as long as you give them credit and format it correctly. Quotes give the reader a break from your voice/tone and provide a different perspective.
Quotes can come from literally any type of writing--books, magazines, poems, songs, diaries, letters, movies, advertisements, scribbled-on napkins that you found on the ground. They don't have to be direct quotes, either--simply referencing what something is about or that it exists ties your piece into a spiderweb of inter-connected works. Mentioning a song title or a certain painting might lead someone to look it up. It's like clicking hyperlink after hyperlink in Wikipedia articles to take you to different pages, except much slower, with fewer underlined things.
The take home: try out new stuff. Make it different from what you usually write. Make it someting worth quoting.
References:
I didn't use any references because I'm a very smart person and I know things.
