Velcro Moments: Making Your Writing Stick

A Velcro Moment is a bit of writing that sticks with a reader. Velcro, you probably know, is a strip of fabric with tiny “hooks” that “mate” with another fabric strip that has smaller loops. These strips attach to each other, until pulled apart. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) Isn’t Velcro a perfect image to illustrate readers getting hooked on your writing?

How do we make our writing unforgettable? National Book Award winner, Barry Lopez, offered gems of advice about this a few years ago at the Rollins College Winter with the Writers Literary Festival. In addition to reading from his stunning award winner, Arctic Dreams, this remarkable essayist, author, and short-story writer conducted a free master writing class. I attended and took copious notes that have stuck with me ever since. Keep reading. They may stick with you, too.

Note: Each year, during that festival, Rollins offers free master classes open to the public.

How do we create a Velcro Moment?

How do we make our writing stick? Lopez urged us to create intimacy with the reader. When we write memoir, for instance, we create intimacy with readers by making ourselves vulnerable, by not being afraid to show we are not perfect, by letting readers in on our weaknesses and secrets. People relate to imperfection —f or certainly no one reading your work is perfect! Similarly, when we write fiction, we aim to create characters with flaws and failings — as if they are REAL people, well-rounded humans, sympathetic —a nd memorable.

Notes stuck on a mirror

What Lopez taught that day made such an impression on me that I’ve taped my Lopez notes to a dresser mirror in my writing/guest room. Each note reminds me of the importance of being stuck — to creating Velcro Moments.

Disclaimer: These notes are not in order of importance. They just reflect the order of my writing them in my notebook while Lopez, scrawling on a whiteboard to illustrate paragraph making, relayed his observations about notable writing.

1. The Velcro Moment. Create intimacy with the reader by making/showing yourself to be vulnerable.
2. When is the story done?  When it sounds right, it is cohesive, it sticks to itself.
3. Novels — remind the reader of something they already know.
4.  Poetry — its essence is not of the intellect, it is of feeling and it’s physical.
5. Metaphor — an idea is being pursued and advanced. The net is the story. The live fish inside is the idea being advanced.
6. Ending a sentence with an open vowel tells you to keep going. A closed consonant, a hard sound, ends the paragraph.
7. Writing is music.
8. The paragraph is geometry. Fill in the middle ground between the first and last sentence. The adjective used at the beginning falls like stone through the paragraph, creates an environment, a feeling for the whole paragraph in the subconscious of the reader.
9. Really different kinds of adjectives should be used to describe a noun.
10.  Use the senses — not just the five, but our sense of location, space. The sonic environment elevates the scene.
11. Proprioception — feel the presence of others. Serves as motivation for a character to move.  Example: Hear the phone ring in the kitchen, so leave the living room and walk back to the small kitchen to pick up the receiver and listen to the voice on the phone say hello.
12. Mine the backside of an event. Bring the reader into the scene —t his creates a “felt” experience. It puts the reader there with you, so they feel it, too.  That way, the story isn’t just about me, they are there with me in it, and so the story is about us, not me.
13. The back side, around the corner, off in the distance, behind the potted plant a small lizard rose up on its front feet, puffing out its orange pouch to show its dominance over the threat I posed him.
14. Who are we writing to? The part of myself that I want to be.
15. Write despite the fear; it never goes away.
16. We are pattern-makers, that’s why we write.
17. 1I want to get someone to enter the scene with me.  I need to work with it until it has a 360-degree reality.
18. Senses take us to the front; memory takes us to the places around the back.
19. Orientation. Steer clear of the “security camera viewpoint” of a scene. Move us around in the scene.
20. Observations and memory. Shifts in verb tense.
21. Mention something not in view. Create the past behind the present.
22. Make room for the reader in the scene.
23. Avoid using “it” or “there is.”
24. Create something beautiful that lifts up the reader, does not diminish others. No pointing fingers.

My favorite is #8: the paragraph is geometry. What’s yours?