How to be a Fake Writer

Jennifer Chou
Dec 20, 2018
3 min read

I like to think I’m a good writer–not just because all my English teachers say so, but also because I harshly criticize every other author’s work because I think I can write better than them. I probably can’t, but a girl can dream and live her life of delusion and denial. I also absolutely hate it when people don’t use the Oxford comma, so as soon as that happens, I automatically already dislike the writer’s style.

Anyway, today I’m going to take you through my writing process. I’m going to focus on prose poetry, since that’s the quickest, easiest piece of writing for me.

Note: if you’re serious about writing, you should probably start a book or bookmarks folder of words you want to use more often, or obscure words you like. I started my folder 2 years ago and it’s chock-full of words I can browse through and put together to inspire me. Synonyms are also a writer’s best friend (in my opinion, at least).

First

Brainstorm some ideas and feelings. Think of a random letter of the alphabet. Let’s go with k. I just Googled some nouns that start with k and picked one that I liked: kaleidoscope.

Its definition is as follows:

a toy consisting of a tube containing mirrors and pieces of colored glass or paper, whose reflections produce changing patterns that are visible through an eyehole when the tube is rotated; a constantly changing pattern or sequence of objects or elements.

Hmm, do you feel that inspiration coursing through your veins? There are so many different directions in which we could take this.

Second

Think of a feeling you want to write about, or something you want to convey in this poem. I’m gonna choose disappointment, since after writing this blog post, I’m gonna go eat chips and binge Orange is the New Black on Netflix. My boyfriend is going to be so exasperated because he wants me to be healthy and fit.

Third

Start writing. Don’t feel pressured–you can always edit your writing later.

Here is what I have so far (I feel a bit pressured now but I’m trying to push it out of my mind because I really want to start watching Orange is the New Black):

Your love is a kaleidoscope of colour: beautiful; reflective; moving. My love is a black hole: vacuous; hungry; destructive. My voracious appetite devours your light, leaving you a shell of who you once were–like cracks in an old, grimy mirror, I am the break in your facade, the imperfection staining your beauty.

Soon there will be nothing left.

Wow this is shorter than I had thought it would be. It’s also a bit darker than I’d intended, but I can roll with this. Often, like Michael Scott, I’ll start something and not even know where I’m going with it–I just hope I find it along the way.

Fourth

Time to edit! I usually do this as I’m writing, but my English teachers hate that because they’re like “oh this is your first draft? No you have to revise it.” I like to edit while I’m writing because it kind of inspires what I write next, and also most of the time I usually forget to go back and change something that needs to be changed. However, if I’m in “the zone” and I have to stop to find a synonym for a certain word, I may lose track of my thought process and forget what I was going to write. Getting caught up in semantics is definitely not a good thing sometimes.

Anyway, I searched up synonyms for words I felt like could be improved upon. For example, I changed “destructive” to “cataclysmic,” “break” to “fracture,” and “beauty” to “charm.”

Here is the edited poem:

Your love is a kaleidoscope of colour: beautiful; reflective; moving. My love is a black hole: vacuous; hungry; cataclysmic. My voracious appetite devours your light, leaving you a shell of who you once were–like cracks in an old, grimy mirror, I am the fracture in your facade, the imperfection staining your charm.