On Kathleen Jennings's "Observation Journal"

Finally, something free! On Black Friday, no less!

Hello friends,

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy Black Friday!

I am neither an influencer nor a finance blogger (thank God), but I am a very neurotic shopper. I love Black Friday. In early November, I make a list of everything I want to buy. Then I spend weeks Googling the vendors that offer the best discounts and free shipping/returns. Then, on Black Friday morning, I work my way down my carefully curated, cross-checked shopping list like a freak.

But who wants to spend more MONEY, amirite??? So today, I want to focus on a FREE writing resource. Finally, an email from someone who doesn’t want anything from you!!!

News

I’m so, so happy to announce that I’ve sold my short story “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” to Diabolical Plots! Please stay tuned for its release in 2024. It should be free to read, and I’d love to get as many eyeballs on it as possible. It’s an oddball little story, soaked in my Catholic upbringing and unexpectedly sweet, and Diabolical Plots is the perfect home for it.

And:

• My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in autumn 2023, hypothetically. (...)

• My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette, Gender, and Race in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in 2024 or thereabouts.

Subscribe to get notified when these come out!

Kathleen Jennings’s “Observation Journal” blog

First of all, I want to provide some context for this resource.

Recently, I read a very boring blog post that I am not going to link to, about Rebecca Yarros’s blockbuster novel Fourth Wing. Specifically, the blogger went on and on about how Fourth Wing is so amazing and successful because it hits a lot of tropes really hard and really fast. Good for Fourth Wing!

I haven’t read Fourth Wing; I have no opinion on it. But here I was, reading about how it’s so financially successful – and to this blogger, financially successful and good were clearly functionally the same thing – because the plot contains a “ticking time bomb,” and the protagonist is a “fish out of water” and an “ugly duckling.” And, look: I’ve talked about tropes myself when covering Story Genius and Save the Cat! and Thrill Me.

But in this case, reading about how this mega-successful book is successful and worth emulating precisely because because it hews so closely to formula, I just felt so bored. And depressed. Is this why I started writing novels as a kid? Is this why any of us do it? Because we want to hit beats?

I feel like the novels I’ve been loving lately, the ones I’m writing toward, drive their shoulders against that tide or blow it up entirely: Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, John Williams’s Stoner, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. 

It’s really hard to find resources that tell you how to write something that isn’t formulaic, though. So I wondered: Can I find a resource that will teach me how to write in a way that’s not just marketable, but different and weird?

Thus I found my way back to Kathleen Jennings’s blog, which I had loved early in the pandemic but hadn’t read in a long time. And today, I’m sharing it with you.

Kathleen Jennings is a short story writer, mostly. She’s won the British Fantasy Award and been shortlisted for others. She keeps a thing called an observation journal, for analyzing the world around her and for sparking creative ideas. Full disclosure, I tried keeping an observation journal and it didn’t work for me – but you should also try it if her format speaks to you. Journaling is free and no-stakes!

As part of her observation journal, she conducts creative writing exercises. I encourage you to go through that tag if you’re feeling creatively stuck and try one or two or three. Here are my favorites:

• Three-mood story structure. This is amazing for thinking about stories in a satisfying, simple-to-conceptualize, three-act way that nevertheless dodges the formula bullet. I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.

• Creative post-mortems. I love a post-mortem! I love looking at something that’s done now, with all the pressure off, and figuring out how to do it better next time!

• Five things to steal from creative works you’ve loved.

Jennings has been keeping her blog for a long time, and there’s a lot of stuff there. It’s partly why I stopped reading it in the first place, because I got overwhelmed. But it’s also a great corner of the Internet for sparking new ideas or reframing old ones: her posts and exercises are loose, playful, and generative.

Let me know if you try any of her exercises – especially the three-mood story structure – and if they work for you.

P.S.: Earlier, I talked about how hard it is to find resources that will teach you how to write against formula. I’m thinking about writing some newsletter posts where I analyze oddball books I’ve loved and try to figure out how they tick. How do y’all feel about this?

(I’ve also been wanting to try out Substack polls, lol.)

Thanks and enjoy the rest of the holiday!