Why I Love to Write: A Lesson in Expandation

I like to stretch out sentences. I discovered this in sixth grade when my English teacher said that for homework we had to expand on the sentence "The princess walked."

There's a million ways to expand that sentence. The princess walked in a meadow; she walked into her room, lonely in her tower. Maybe she didn't walk, she ran into the arms of her prince. Mine became a story of a knight waiting for her as she walked a drawbridge. She was going to be his bride because he had saved the whole kingdom from some kind of horror. Maybe it was a dragon. or an evil sorcerer. I don't know. It's not saved on my computer anymore. That one is gone now.

The point is, I made something pretty with a tiny idea. I crafted these gorgeous sentences that I can't even remember anymore. I realized that I could really write, and maybe even well. This quality was honed in seventh, and pursued in several different ways in eighth grade. Over the summer I took a writing class, which, despite being mostly worthless, I saw how people could write better than me. Which, of course, motivated me to write better than them.

For a very rare exmaple of this whole "expanding" technique: Truman Capote, the dude who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's (Yes, it was a book firts!) write the American classic, In Cold Blood, based on a 300-word article on the murder of a Kansas family. That book was a mulit-million dollar project, and is now important enough to be required reading for the tenth graders at my school. That's expandation to the extreme, though.

Basically, to do expandation you just gotta have the drive to rework and rewrite what already exists. A novel's idea doesn't pop in at 50,000+ words. A novel starts at no more than the size of a blurb on the front flap of a dust cover. A plot will never stay exactly the same, so I wouldn't say it is the blurb itself.

Baby, it freaking works. For any writer who can't find the real motivation, (none of my friends, of course.) just try to add big words to what you have just floating around your mind. And some dialogue.

Best of luck to you all. :)