Write Best-Sellers in Your Spare Time!

Recently, I was working in the Writing Center when a fellow came in and asked me what my major was. When I told him creative writing, he had the same reaction as virtually everyone I meet—"I could never write. How can you just make stuff up like that?"

Now, I don’t know about other writers, but making stuff up has always come easy for me, as I am an only child with no brothers or sisters to blame things on. ("The cat must have opened that jar of ink and spilled it all over the very important documents in the desk, and then used the seal stamper to punch a dirty word into your Last Will and Testament, Mom! Also, I only have six months to live.")

And of course the major contributing factor to my skill as a would-be writer is my extreme lack of a real life, which prompts me to make up imaginary ones, in which I usually get whisked away by handsome men and solve crimes and diffuse bombs MacGuyver-style while dangling from fishing line, all the while cracking wise and making complex allusions to the works of Dante and Locke.

This almost, but not quite, makes up for the fact that all I really do is make funny faces at myself in the mirror and lip-synch to the music of Tom Jones.

However, the fact that not everyone feels they can participate in the fascinating world of fictionalizing life’s foibles for fun and profit makes me sad and appalled, as well as giving me major intestinal distress.

So, to aid you in your quest for literary gold, I have put together the Patented Super-Cool Sure-Fire Kim Shable Guide To Writing Fiction And Real Life Stuff That You’d Like To Pass Off As Fiction Because Your Mom Would Think It Was Horrible If She Knew It Was For Real.

This part is always fun. I have two general rules for making up a main character: if I want him or her to be good, I base him on myself, and if I want him or her to be bad, I base him on Bernie Keister, my mortal enemy from high school that told me I was too fat and ugly to be in theater. Unfortunately, this means most of my antagonists are bald and wear funny sweaters. But I can be flexible. Sometimes, they can wear sweater vests.

What good is a story if it doesn’t have some sort of situation? Say, for example, that the Bernie Keister character has just strapped a bomb to his chest and entered a Circuit City, where the Me character is shopping for the new Boxcar Willie CD. What does the Me character do? And don’t say "wet her pants," because as realistic as that sounds, no one will want to read it. Trust me.

This is the part where you sit on your butt and think of things that could happen. For example, while trying to save the Me character from the BK character, I came up with the fact that if you switch the first letters of my adviser’s name, it becomes Moe Jackall, which of course has nothing to do with the story, but made me laugh so hard I almost messed myself.

If you can’t think of a good ending for your story, never fear. Critics love tragic endings. And there’s nothing more tragic than all your main characters getting run over by a big old truck.

Thanks to my excellent guidelines, anyone can be the next Pulitzer Prize winner. And what better place to display your masterpieces than within the pages of Passages, AU’s premier literary magazine? (Plug plug plug.) Don’t delay, or I’ll be forced to write a story in which you die beneath the wheels of a big-rig.