Strange might just be the slowly growing sub-genre when it comes to young adult fiction. The idea is to represent ideas, experiences and values through means that are OUT THERE. It’s about putting emotion into things that wouldn’t normally have emotions so you can let people know about the deeper part of yourselves.
I had the pleasure of attending a writing workshop with the queen of strange Amy King. If you haven’t already go check out all the amazing books she has written!
So here are Amy’s top tips for writing strange:
-
Keep it real
Good stories come straight from the heart so remember to be true to yourself
2. Tell people how you feel and not what happened
Too often we get caught up in the action, the plot of a story. But the real gold lies in grabbing people into the whirlwind of emotions that you were feeling, its about raw, painful, gut wrenching feelings.
3. Write from a different perspective
One of the reasons Amy writes fiction and from various PoVs is because it makes it easier for her to project her feelings onto a secondary character. Since emotions are so personal already,writing from an objective perspective gives you room
4. Reach in
So this whole post is about feelings YAY. But yeah in determining your emotions and how you feel it’s easier said than done. Something that might help could be asking yourself, really asking yourself how you felt
5. Try putting emotions into inanimate objects
This is where the real strange lies. One of the exercises we did was pretending we were an object in the room we were sitting in. This object had to best represent how we felt. So fro example, you felt like a carpet cuz you felt walked on. It just makes the story so much more interesting if you can make things that usually don’t talk, talk.
I hope these helped you budding writing out there!
Infinity Reads 