EDITING

Interesting link, here:  What It Takes: The Second Draft (Is Not a Draft)

So what are the beginning, middle and end of Editing? How do you complete THE SECOND DRAFT THAT ISN’T A DRAFT?

Well, I’ve spent the last six months or so at www.storygrid.com to explain what it is editors do. And the website is the basis of my upcoming book The Story Grid: What Good EditorsKnow, which is just about to go to the printer.

It would be terrific if you bought a copy, but you don’t have to. Everything you need to know about editing is free at www.storygrid.com. Really.

But to answer the above question simply:

The beginning of editing is creating a Story Grid Spreadsheet.

The middle of editing is creating a Foolscap Global Story Grid.

And the end of editing is putting together the Spreadsheet and the Foolscap Page into a complete Story Grid for your first draft.

Once you’ve finished Editing or THE SECOND DRAFT THAT ISN’T A DRAFT, you will have a clear understanding of what you’ll need to do in the drafts to come. You will not fear these drafts. Rather you will be re-energized to tackle the obvious problems in your first draft with vim and vigor.

You’ll have that confidence because you’ll know exactly what you’ll need to do to fix the problems and you’ll have a strategy to get that work done.

That is what THE SECOND DRAFT THAT IS NOT A DRAFT is all about.

What It Takes: The Second Draft (Is Not a Draft)

the David Lean Rule

a follow-up (and closely related) to last week’s The Clothesline Method.

“Here’s the David Lean Rule, as I would state it, for my own benefit as a writer or for anyone else:

In addition to thinking of a narrative in terms of Act One/Act Two/Act Three, think of it as eight to twelve sequences or sections.

I use this all the time. It’s extremely helpful, I’ve found, with long-form material like novels or full-length non-fiction. Why? Because the Three Act concept of organizing a narrative doesn’t always work with something that’s really lo-o-o-ng.

Three-act structure, remember, was developed for plays, for dramas presented on stage, and for movies—in other words for works that would be taken in by the audience at a single sitting. A play or a movie takes ninety minutes, at most a couple of hours. We in the audience have no trouble remembering, as we’re watching Act Three, some set-up scene or moment from Act One. Three-act structure works. It abets and reinforces the narrative’s momentum. Act One hooks us, Act Two builds the tension and complications, Act Three delivers the payoff.

But a 500-page novel doesn’t work like that. We may take a month to read such a weighty tome. We’ll pick it up at bedtime, read 60 pages, then not touch it again for a week. Three-act structure doesn’t always work in this case because the narrative is not designed to be consumed in one sitting. By the time we hit page 396, we’ve forgotten key characters and moments that were introduced on page 21. And even if we do still remember them, the momentum of the story has been lost because so much time has passed. We, the readers, have to reconstitute it by act of memory at each new sitting.

The David Lean Rule comes in really handy here. If we as writers build our narrative out of eight to twelve sequences or sections, each one of which is more or less free-standing (and possesses its own cohesion and story momentum), the reader can pick up the book and be back into the flow right away.

Another big plus, in my opinion, is that thinking in sequences, as David Lean would, gives a story a classic, old-fashioned feel, like Lean’s movies. I like that. It’s old time storytelling.”

Read more, here: the David Lean Rule

The Clothesline Method

Great idea here for writing a narrative:

"I’m just starting a new novel, trying to figure out the shape of the damn thing. Here’s a trick I use that might help you too. I call it the Clothesline Method.

The line starts out empty.

Then you hang the shirts and towels and underwear (the scenes and sequences) on it.

I aim for between eight and twelve.

Sometimes I’ll actually draw a clothesline on a piece of paper (yellow foolscap, my fave) and sketch in a dozen or so squares hanging beneath.

What I love about this method is it’s simple and it’s dumb. It takes all the preciousness out of the process. And it eliminates a lot of the fear. How hard is it to hang a dozen dresses, sheets, and pairs of blue jeans on a line?

Read more at Writing Wednesday

Becoming Our Own Editors

"Writers today have to be their own editors because it’s so hard to find a real editor, meaning someone who understands story structure and can help the writer whip her work into ready-for-prime-time shape. The breed has become extinct, alas, at most publishing houses (or those who carry the title of editor and have the chops are so busy with material acquisition, marketing, and internal politics that they don’t have time to sit down and work with their writers in the old-school, Maxwell-Perkins, hands-on manner.)

It’s probably a good thing that we writers have to be our own editors. After all, who if not us should be responsible for the shape of our work?

But how do we become our own editors? What skills do we need? Where can we acquire these skills?

The editor’s primary creative contribution—i.e.,the skill that you and I need to master—is this:

The editor understands narrative structure. He knows what makes a story work. He understands genre. He knows that every story falls into a genre, and that every genre has conventions. He knows what those conventions are, and he understands how to use them.

Have you taken Robert McKee’s class in Story Structure? Take it. Take his class in Love Story. Take his class in Thriller. Whatever he’s teaching, take it.

Read Stephen King’s On Writing.

Read writers’ blogs.

Read everything you can on the subject of story structure and story analysis.

Keep reading. Keep watching movies. Learn the skill of editing the same way editors learn it. Study stuff that works (and stuff that doesn’t) and ask yourself, “How did the writer do that? How did she achieve this power, this emotion, this meaning?”

When you and I find a book or movie that we love, we have to read it and watch it over and over. Take notes. Ingest it. Pick it apart page by page and frame by frame till we understand how it works as well as the writer or filmmaker who created it.

Shawn’s concept of the Story Grid wasn’t handed to him on a platter. He figured it out on his own by reading and thinking and reading and thinking some more after that.

Can you analyze Hamlet?

Can you break down Blade Runner or The Usual Suspects or Taken 2?

The task is not impossible. It’s fun, particularly if you love the material. I can watch movies I love over and over and read the same books again and again.

Shawn’s concept of a “grid” is an excellent way to think of story analysis. We lay the story out on the operating table and we “put a grid over it.” The grid is like a template. It represents the archetypal version of Story.

There’s a grid for thrillers and a grid for love stories and a grid for police procedurals. Each one is a genre, and each genre has its unique conventions. When you set the Love Story grid over your love story, you are checking the anatomy, the architecture of your work against the universal, classic dimensions of the tales of Romeo and Juliet, Tracy Lord and C.K. Dexter Haven, Thelma and Louise.

Does your love story have the same moving parts that Shakespeare used? Do they appear in the same order?

Have you invented something new? Great. What is it? If it defies convention, how? What makes it work?

What editorial-type thinking does, what a concept like Shawn’s Grid does, is it gives us poor benighted writers a tool to analyze that pile of pages that we’ve pounded out in an ecstasy of unconscious inspiration. Our first draft is done. We’ve got our story. We’ve been working so far, as writers should, with our right brains—our instincts.

Now we switch to our left brain.

We zoom back to 30,000 feet.

We view our story impartially and objectively. We evaluate it alongside an imaginary model of the Universal Story, just like a Ferrari mechanic tests the engine of a new Testarossa against the engineering sheet from the factory.

Does our Love Story have lovers who are drawn to each other powerfully and passionately?

(We’re using the Grid now, checking the elements of our story against the conventions of the genre of Love Story.)

Is there a force that is keeping our lovers apart?

Do we have a moment when the lovers get together and cosmic sparks fly? When in the story does this moment come?

Do we have a moment when the lovers are pulled apart? When does this moment come?

What force produces this estrangement? Is it external or internal? Both?

Is there an All Is Lost moment? Does it come at the end of Act Two or deep into Act Three? How is this moment resolved?

Do the lovers come together at the end? How? How did they overcome the force that was keeping them apart?

(We’re our own editors now. We’re asking ourselves the same questions an editor would ask us.)

What is the theme of our love story? What greater issue (social, political, religious) has brought our lovers together and what issue is keeping them apart? How is this theme reflected in the crisis, the climax, the resolution?

An editor might say to us, “Watch The Way We Were. Pay attention to the political/moral/social ideals that Barbra Streisand holds that are irreconcilable with the worldview held by Robert Redford, even though Babs and Bob love each other desperately. Watch how these forces are introduced into the story and how they evolve and become more and more prominent, until they become inescapable and must be faced by the lovers. Ask yourself how this connects to the movie’s theme.”

Do we in our story have forces like that and are they as powerful, as real, and as clearly delineated?

No?

Maybe that’s why our story isn’t working.

I know this sounds daunting. It is daunting. But this arcane art, the skill of the editor, is—more than talent, more than luck—what separates real writers from wannabes"

from http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2014/10/becoming-our-own-editors/

Writing Help: Dive or Wade? | WritingCompanion

Dive or Wade?

Some writers like to dive straight into the help pool, immersing themselves in many kinds of writing assistance. They zap through innumerable books, workshops, and websites, and may join not one but several writing groups.

Some learners find it exhilarating to get their hands on so much information and help in a short period. For others, being deluged with much new information can be confusing, stressful, and cause them to lose confidence.

Wading is another choice, which some learners prefer and others take up because work and other commitments make it impractical to dive in. They start at the shallow, comfortable end of the writing help pool, perhaps reading a few relevant blogs and books, participating in a short workshop, attending a one-off lecture. As they grow more confident about their needs and interests, they strike out into deeper, adventurous water. They may enrol in a long-term course or sign up with a mentor. This approach does not overwhelm learners, but some find the learning process frustratingly slow.

Whether you dive or wade, writing help works best when it fits your needs. Too often, we evaluate help opportunities in terms of their cost and convenience. It’s more promising to focus instead of us, as writers, in terms of our...

Read more here!

Writing Help: Dive or Wade? | WritingCompanion:

What We See When We Read

This article, is worth reading.  It’s excerpt from What We See When We Read, by Peter Mendelsund. Click on the link below for more :

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/14/what-we-see-when-we-read/

"Most authors (wittingly, unwittingly) provide their fictional characters with more behavioral than physical description. Even if an author excels at physical description, we are left with shambling concoctions of stray body parts and random detail (authors can’t tell us everything). We fill in gaps. We shade them in. We gloss over them."

* * *

"Literary characters are physically vague—they have only a few features, and these features hardly seem to matter—or, rather, these features matter only in that they help to refine a character’s meaning. Character description is a kind of circumscription. A character’s features help to delineate their boundaries—but these features don’t help us truly picture a person."

* * *

"It is precisely what the text does not elucidate that becomes an invitation to our imaginations. So I ask myself: Is it that we imagine the most, or the most vividly, when an author is at his most elliptical or withholding?"

***

"Though we may think of characters as visible, they are more like a set of rules that determines a particular outcome. A character’s physical attributes may be ornamental, but their features can also contribute to their meaning."

Ray Bradbury’s Zen Writing

Ray Bradbury started early as a writer, penning his first story when he was 11 years old. He created the habit of writing each day, and kept submitting his growing number of stories to the popular pulp magazines. At 22, he finally succeeded in getting a story published.

A long writing career followed, with 27 published novels, including the popular Fahrenheit 451, and 600 short stories, including the collections, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Through his writing, Bradbury helped shift the focus of sci-fi from the monsters from outer space to the scarier monsters within ourselves and our society.

Years later, as a famous and respected writer, Bradbury distilled his thoughts about the writing craft in a series of essays, later collected in the book, Zen in the Art of Writing. I recently read it and enjoyed the enthusiasm and confidence that came through in his writing.

The book’s title is based on a book, Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, a German philosopher. While teaching in Japan in the 1920s, he took lessons to master Japanese archery, which combines physical and mental skills. One day, he discovered a  ‘shortcut’ technique that enabled him to hit the target, again and again. However, his teacher chastised him because this outcome was the product of having ‘much too wilful will’, rather than aiming to reach a state of being ‘without purpose’, in the zen of the moment.

In his essays, Bradbury, like a zen archer, focuses on process rather than product.

Writing and story ideas

Dig into the personal and true to find your ‘individual truth’.  Delve into your personal ideas storehouse to write about your best and worst experiences, items from childhood, sensory impressions, conversations. Look for ‘honest’ ways to express emotion—love, admiration, excitement, hate.

Be a omnivore reader. Nearly any material can provide writing ideas. Read the works of authors who write like you, as well as those whose writing differs from yours. Read poetry each day. Poems can provide story ideas, expand your senses, and give you examples of powerful, beautiful metaphors and similes. Find story ideas in practical articles. Don’t try to understand everything in an article. Be a dilettante, letting your reading connect with your subconscious, memories and beliefs. Reading a travel article about an isolated beach may lead to you recalling an important childhood experience or brainstorming what could happen there, and to whom.

Establish a rich writing habit

Write daily, aiming for quantity rather than quality. A consistent, regular writing habit lets you achieve a relaxed state, where the words flow. In his early career, Bradbury set himself the target of writing 1,000 words each day, plus completing and sending off at least one short story each week.

Write fast in order to write honestly. Hesitation causes writers to trade truth for style or let self-consciousness creep in.

Free associate by drawing up a list of words (e.g., titles or nouns), selecting one word from the list, and freewriting.

‘Blurt’ your ideas when writing your first draft, without over thinking or editing prematurely.

Turn a first draft into a polished story

• Shape your material in terms of what matters to readers.
• Sensory richness. Make your story feel authentic by including rich sensory details:  Colours, shapes, sizes, smells, sounds, textures.
• Character and dynamo. What do your characters want? Dream about? Knowing this puts the dynamo or energy into your story. When you know this, your characters will develop much of the story for you.
• Emotion. Highlight your characters’ emotions, passions.
• Tension. Incorporate conflict, opposites.  Make characters ‘fly together in a great clang.’
• Release. Finish the story with a crucial action that releases the tension you have built.  The action should ring true in terms of your characters, their desires and needs.

from Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury Joshua Odell Editions

http://writingcompanion.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/bradbury-zen-writing-advice/

A NOTE ON THE 5-7-5 'HAIKU' by George Szirtes

I ought to explain that I am not really interested in the notion of an 'authentic' haiku. I have no ambition to write authentic haiku.

I am not of that cast of mind.

I am, however, interested in a form that goes short-long-short. It's exactly like writing in rhyme or with stress or with syllabics. The pattern of three short lines in simple language with a swell in the middle offers possibilities that I, and others, like to explore.

In a similar way I am not interested in writing only Spenserian or Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets. I don't believe in these mysteries: above all I have no particular love for authenticity.

A sonnet is a 14 line territory with echoes and landmarks that behaves in certain ways but can behave in others. Those echoes and landmarks are other sonnets that include the Shakespearian, the Petrarchan etc.

Rhyme is a process not a merely a product.

A 5-7-5 pattern can be called a haiku for convenience, but, like the sonnet, it is a territory with echoes and landmarks. Those echoes and landmarks remind us of what other, possibly more 'authentic', or possible NOT 5-7-5 haiku have done and might do.

This sonnet and that sonnet are related but not the same.

This 'haiku' and that 'haiku' are related but not the same.

Form is a constraint on process. Ditto all other givens.

Constraints are for enabling processes, not golden rules for the production of a certain kind of product.

This is what I have always believed. It is what I have always practiced. It is a kind of new testament: the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. That is where my vote goes.

If people want something else they can get it somewhere else.

George Szirtes

Turning Your Anecdote into a Short Story

"Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about."

 - Alice Munro

Your writing rehearsal

The WHOLE of this blog post is well worth reading.  Just click on the link, below:

Your writing rehearsal. | Sarah Selecky: "Here is why you should practice with warm-ups and writing exercises:

1. It shows you how to recognize your resistance as resistance. This is crucial, because if you don’t recognize it for what it is, then you won’t write very often. Or you’ll push yourself and suffer through writing in an ugly way.

2. You’ll know what a certain discomfort feels like in your body when you write something that feels honest. You’ll do this over and over again in your practice, and learn how it feels different when you write stereotypes and clichés. So even though it’s always going to be challenging, you become more familiar with the feeling of writing what feels real.

3. You’ll be surprised by your own writing. You’ll learn things about your characters, your sentences, and your stories that you didn’t expect. You’ll find delight and pleasure in your creative life.

4. You get better at it. Good writers are writers who practice writing."

'via Blog this'

Strategies for Writing

 In honor of Anne Lamott, here’s a tips list summarizing, very briefly, some of the points she makes in her terrific book on writing, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

1. Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you’re writing is any good or not.
2. Give yourself short assignments. Keep it manageable so you don’t get overwhelmed.
3. Write sh**ty first drafts. (I’m not being prissy about the word choice, just don’t want to get hung up in spam filters.) Don’t expect a piece of writing to flow perfectly out of your fingers on the first go. Of all the points she makes, many people seem to find this one the most helpful.
4. Let the Polaroid develop; in other words, observe, watch, listen, stay in the moment, until you understand what you want to write about.
5. Know your characters.
6. Let the plot grow out of the characters.
7. If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing…it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. You need to put yourself at their center, you and what you believe to be true or right.”
8. Figure out ways to jam the transmissions from Radio KFKD, the interior station feeding doubts and criticism into your brain. Especially about jealousy of other writers.
9. Have pen and paper ready at all times. (She always carries an index card.)
10. Call around. Ask for help.
11. Start a writing group.
12. Write in your own voice.
13. Being published brings a quiet joy, but it doesn’t transform your life, and eventually you have to write again.
14. “Devotion and commitment will be their own reward.”

from The Happiness Project

That first draft...

Writing seems to be an awful lot of re-learning things I should already know. I don’t know why I forget some of these basics, but I continually find myself saying, “Oh yeah… I knew that,” and wondering why yet again, I went down a road I should have known went nowhere.

My most recently forgotten guideline of writing is that first drafts don’t have to be perfect. This was the very first thing I ever learned about writing a novel, and I didn’t even realize I‘d been caught in that very counter-productive trap until last week. Initially, I was only aware that it seemed to be taking a lot longer than usual for me to get the story moving. It wasn’t till I asked myself what the holdup was that I acknowledged what was happening and began practicing something I already know: write first, edit later.

I’ve read the left-brain/right-brain theories which suggest that creative writing and technical revising require the use of opposite sides of the brain. Allegedly, to try to utilize both sides simultaneously results in a kind of cerebral squabble that ends up clogging the system and cancelling out both endeavors, like some kind of cognitive conflict of interest. Whether or not this is the truth, I don’t know. But I do know that for me, editing as I’m writing doesn't work.



In order for me to get to the story written, I need to drop my “good writing” pretenses, ignore the sentences that suck along the way, just keep moving, and save the spit-shining for the edits. I know this… yet until a few days ago, I was spending hours on paragraphs where no more than a few minutes were needed, at least in this stage of the game anyway.

I’ve given it some thought and have narrowed down the culprits which have triggered this first draft amnesia. The main offender is the new standard I’ve reflexively set for myself; entirely my fault, no surprise there. I’m working on my third novel, and with the previous two under my belt, my expectations of myself have been raised. I reason that by now, I should have a pretty firm grip on what I’m doing and shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time searching for the right words, or ransacking the corners of my mind trying to remember some grammatical technicality or another. That with enough practice we will eventually get good enough to throw gold on paper with the first flick of our wrists, requiring no second, third, or fourth drafts, unfortunately, is a myth. At least, I don’t think that will ever happen for me. I’m almost as dim-witted now as I was two years ago, and perhaps, even more so. The ordinances of the English language and the guidelines of good storytelling are vast. When you’re constantly learning new things, the new information can bury the previous knowledge, leaving you completely dumbfounded when you should be on the ball. This is perfectly okay. That’s what re-writes are for.

The second contributor to this roadblock is having an audience. It’s not a secret anymore that I’m writing. My prior novels have passed through the hands of many friends, agents, and fellow writers, and I’m all too aware that this same fate awaits my current manuscript. I have to remind myself that this is a good thing. When people are eager to read your next project, it’s a good sign you’re doing something right. Still, the pressure is unnerving and I have to pretend, on some level, that no one will ever see it, and try to go back to the days of hobbyist writing.

The final villain in this particular drama is my mentor. Oh yeah, I said it. She and I meet twice a week to do critique, and though we’ve been doing this for almost two years, things are different now than they were in the early days. For one thing, I’m no longer new enough at this to play the bright-eyed, ”God-Bless-Your-Ignorant-Heart” novice I was once able to pull off. I’ve spent two years under her tutorship and in that time, I’ve learned more than I ever thought there was to know about this craft. I don’t have the luxury of being uneducated anymore, and that kind of sucks.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore my mentor. And it isn’t her Master’s degree in English that intimidates me. Nor is it her years of teaching, or even her owned published books. The problem is that the book she’s currently writing is really damned good. From premise to execution, from characterization to climax, this story casts its golden shadow down hard and heavy on my own project, making it difficult for me to bring her my weekly progress with any kind of pride. But this is good, and here is why: it’s forcing me to get better. Not that I need to feel that I’m a “better writer” than this guy or that girl, but the stakes are higher now, and for the sake of not embarrassing myself, I need to bring some pretty powerful stuff to the table.

There are no doubt thousands of reasons why we slip into bad habits and backslide into unfavorable territory in writing, but if you look at it from different angles, you’ll see that for each new barricade there’s a proportionate opportunity to improve your craft. I think of these stumbling blocks as Fate’s way of upping the ante and lighting the necessary fire under your ass that will get you back in the game with your head on straight and your determination resuscitated and revitalized.

As for forgetting even the basest principles of writing (such as allowing yourself to write bad first drafts), I say forget these things as often as you can, because each time you come back to the basics, you’ll be able to experience the pleasure of seeing your progress in other ways. Back at the very beginning of things is where we see the headway we’ve made. Also, as you “fail” more and more, your armor gets thicker and your tools sharper, so…

Published at http://jsascribes.wordpress.com

To write is to serve, to put your heart and soul into service.

"To write is to serve, to put your heart and soul into service. Who do you serve? The collective human heart and soul, the inner life of others.

Like all service, writing is hard work. You must funnel reams of words through your fingers, laying down sentences like an athlete lays down miles. You must go on your knees to the mysteries of creation, like a priest before the altar.

You must develop practices that cocoon your inner, imaginative life, protecting it from assaults by the outer world — including your own longings for money and fame — so you can keep on giving. You must read widely, and emulate writing masters, until you’ve worked out what it is that only you can say.

And how you’re going to say it.

Do all this well and you’ll find your service to others also serves you, all the days of your writing life."

Joni Rodgers, founder of The LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY AUTHORS

The Cocoon of Creation

The Cocoon of Creation | By Orna Ross.: "To take time out of time. To stop thinking, pushing, striving, doing. To drop the drive of ego and allow something else to be."

Artistic Indulgence

"Artistic indulgence of whatever kind is the antithesis of artistic unity. Artistic unity is the practice which holds that there must be nothing in the story that is irrelevant to the plot; that there be nothing mentioned that does not contribute to the meaning, texture, or final result of the story. Artistic unity is the weaving and ultimate uniting of all the puzzle pieces, and every good plot has plenty of it. In short, if you’re going to draw attention to a thing, make sure it pays off, otherwise readers will feel like Alice chasing the White Rabbit down a hole, only to find nothing at the end."

from  Hooker Boots, White Rabbits, and Artistic Unity « jsascribes:

Henry Miller's Commandments, from Henry Miller on Writing:

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Having Trouble Getting Yourself To Write? 9 Tips.

The most challenging aspect of being a writer?Writing. When I find myself struggling to be productive or creative, I remind myself of these nine tips.

1. Write every day. Staying inside a project keeps me engaged, keeps my mind working, and keeps ideas flowing. Also, I find, perhaps surprisingly, it’s easier to do something every day than to do it some days. (This may be related to the abstainer/moderator split.) "You're just grinding out material," a friend protested. "But that's when I have my best ideas," I answered.

2. Even fifteen minutes is long enough to write. For years I told myself, “If I don’t have three or four hours clear, there’s no point in starting.” Now I realize that if I'm deep in a project (see #1), even a short bit of time is long enough to get something done.

3. Remember that good ideas often come during the revision stage. I've found, for myself, that I need to get a beginning, middle, and an end in place, and then the more creative and complex ideas begin to form. So I try not to be discouraged by first drafts.

4. Don’t binge-write. Pulling all-nighters, wearing pajamas for days, abandoning all other priorities to finish a project—these habits lead to burn-out. Also, if you do all your writing at the last minute, you don't get the benefit of #3.

5. Keep a commonplace book, inspiration board, scrapbook, or catch-all box to keep track of ideas and images. Not only do such collections help you remember thoughts, they create juxtapositions that stimulate creativity. My catch-all happiness document for happiness is 500 pages long, single-spaced. When I need a mental jolt, I just skip around and read random sections. It always helps.

6. Consider physical comfort. Do you have a decent desk and chair? Are you hungry? Too hot or too cold? (I now wearfingertipless gloves at my desk, because my hands are always so cold; they make me so happy.) Do you jam your shoulders up to your ears as you write? Is the light too dim or too bright? Make a salute—if you feel relief when your hand is shading your eyes, your desk is too brightly lit. Being physically uncomfortable tires you out and makes work seem harder.

7. Down with boredom. When my college roommate was writing her Ph.D. thesis, she kept a sticky note on her computer that read, "Down with boredom." She'd vowed to construct her thesis in a way that eliminated everything she found boring. When I'm working on a book, I repeat that mantra. If something's boring to me, I probably can't write about it in an interesting way. I need to find a way to make that subject interesting (Secret of Adulthood: If you can't get out of it, get into it), or find a way to leave it out altogether.

8. Stuck? Go for a walk and read a good book. Virginia Woolf noted in her diary: “The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw.”

9. At least in my experience, the most important tip for getting writing done? Have something to say! This sounds obvious, but it’s a lot easier to write when you’re trying to tell a story, explain an idea, convey an impression, give a review, or whatever. If you're having trouble writing, forget about the writing and focus on what you want to communicate. For example, I remember flailing desperately as I tried to write my college and law-school application essays. It was horrible—until in both cases I realized I had something I really wanted to say. Then the writing came easily, and those two essays are among my favorites of things I’ve ever written.

The Happiness Project

MY TOP 10 WRITING TIPS

"Of course there are more than 10, but these should give you some food for thought – together with [Anna's] comments!

Number 1: think before you write.  No, really, because if you don’t then you are storing up trouble later on.  Give yourself the luxury of a ‘think tank’ all of your own before you ever put pen to paper.

Number 2:  what do you want to write?  I am talking form not content here.  Short story, novel, play, radio drama, podcast, film?  Each has a different approach so back to number 1 and think about it first – it’s not always your first thought of the appropriate medium that would suit your writing best.

Number 3:  why do you want to write it?  Creative fulfilment, to make money, to get clients, to enlighten and/or entertain?  All of these are valid, and it helps to know what your focus is.

Number 4:  who do you want to read it? Your ideal reader: are they a business person, a child, someone under 30 or over 60?   It matters because you will use different language to reach different audiences.

Number 5:  perspiration.  Because writing is not for the fainthearted, you need to put some effort in – though not necessarily sweat your way to success!

Number 6:  heart or head?  You, and your reader, are you appealing to their intellect and sense of logic or tugging their heartstrings – or both?

Number 7:   style and content.   Always go with your natural style if at all possible because then it will be your authentic writing voice.  Is that warm and chatty, cool and distant, short spiky sentences or long expositions?  You can do both, but match the style to the content: for example, a love story written in academic language won’t stir many hearts and a manual on how to get out of debt will irritate the reader if the language is not direct, clear and from the heart.

Number 8:  consistency.  A natural follow on to number 5 because if you are applying yourself to your writing you must do it regularly and consistently.  Block time out in your diary and make it sacred – it is.

Number 9;  edit and review.  However brilliant that first draft, it will be improved by your re-reading, editing and reviewing it – and then giving it to someone else to do see if it makes sense or could be improved.  You do’t have to accept their ideas, but it’s a good idea to do a little testing to see if you have achieved what you set out to do.

Number 10:  inspiration.  Why is this last?  Because for most writers it comes first, and they ignore the previous 9.  Inspiration is necessary, but not always and not all the time.  If you are waiting for it before you start writing then you will never get round to it.  Apply rules 1-9 as if you had been inspired and you will find by the end that you probably have been."

from Creative Catalyst by AnnA Rushton

Poem

Remember, you aren’t dealing with a novel;
a poem is not a fine carpet of words.

Rather it is a path across a field
to what might turn out to be a wood

or a line of cottages. It wasn’t written
for you, like a note on the kitchen table, explaining

Back later – Adrian phoned – Buy milk. It says
something that you can’t quite understand

about the colour of the sky. Some poets
will casually deploy words like eldritch, ontic,

topos and chthonic that may cause
the reader to turn away or turn to other books.

It is not absolutely certain why, or if
this is deliberate. A poem is

a doomed struggle against the world, a series
of failures that add up to something more important

than its success. If you choose to walk through a poem
as you would an unfamiliar neighbourhood,

noticing perhaps two lovers at an uncurtained window,
then you will be more likely to return

to it, aware this time of other things,
the names of streets, the habits of local dogs.

C. J. Allen 2011

Poem is probably accounted for by my spending more time reading and writing and thinking about poems than is actually healthy for a grown man. If it’s trying to do anything, then I hope Poem encourages people to feel more comfortable with those aspects of poems which aren’t immediately or easily understood. I think about it as a kind of postcard to the reader.  C. J. Allen

Writing Fitness - for combating Writer's Block

Hints and tips from JSASCRIBES

1. Read something. One of the most effective things I’ve done when I am faced with the perpetual blank page is read. It doesn’t seem to matter what I read, but a good thirty to ninety minutes of reading something usually gets my mind working in a more creative way.

2. Get some exercise. I don’t know how or why this helps writing, or if it applies to other people at all, but for me, getting some good, strenuous exercise seems to release those mysterious “endorphins” everyone’s always talking about, and gives me the extra push I need.

3. Write something else. Sometimes, I just need to write something totally unrelated to the story I am working on. This is where having a blog comes in handy. I might also write someone a letter, or a long e-mail, or write some new poetry.

4. Reread the story. This one is a tricky one and it wouldn’t be at the top of my list of things to do, but a lot of times, rereading the story I  am working on inspires me to go on with it. There have been times though, that the effect has given the opposite effect.

5. Pry, spy, and lie. As a natural-born busybody, this one is probably my favorite. I take a pen and paper and go somewhere and find someone (or several people) who strike my interest for some reason or another. I give them new names, new jobs, a brand new past, and if I am cranky, a life-threatening illness. I cast them into a make-believe present situation, usually something very critical and/or scandalous, and ponder the different ways they might handle it.

6. Try something new. As simple as it sounds, there’s something to be said for doing something you’ve never done before, tasting something you’ve never tasted, going somewhere you’ve never been, or talking to someone you’ve never met.

7. Get involved in your local writing community. Wherever you might live, chances are good that you share your space with a few or a few hundred like-minded folks who are part of a local writing community. Getting involved means meeting other people who have fresh ideas. It means submerging yourself in the world of writing and bringing it to the forefront of your mind. It means learning new skills, meeting with new opportunities, and finding new inspiration.

8. Join, or start, a critique group. When you’re part of a critique group, it’s hard to not write. You have a sense of expectation from yourself, and the other members are depending on you to keep the group going.

9. Assign the time. By assigning yourself a certain time of day to write for a specific duration, you are training yourself to respond accordingly. If you know you have to sit down and write Monday though Friday from 6:30 pm to 7:00 pm, it’s just a matter of time before your mind starts to accept its duties. If you don’t know what to write for that half hour, start out by writing about not knowing what to write.

10. Interview the characters. Another one of my favorites, interviewing my characters almost always leads to some kind of revelation about the character or the story he or she is in, and makes me eager to write it all out. To interview the characters, I sit down at the computer and write out a kind of questions and answers game. This exercise is both fun and effective.