Marathon Writer: Riding the High

Picture taken by my bored and frustrated son.

Well, I just finished probably one of the most intense writing sessions ever since the writing bug bit me a little over 6 years ago. I can hardly believe it, but I managed a whopping 45,000 words in one week on a new novel idea. Yep, 45,000 in ONE week. The most I ever wrote in a stretch was 50,000, which was over a full month for the NaNoWriMo in 2010, so for me this is HUGE deal.

The Truth About Creativity

Creativity is a fickle playmate that likes to play hide and seek with the best of us. I, like many artists, have discovered this first hand. In fact, many writers blame creativity, or the lack of it, for periods of forced writing and/or not writing at all, claiming the muse has just up and walked off without another thought. I've claimed this many times myself. So it leaves the struggling artist with the age old question... can creativity be harnessed?And in an extension to that, can creativity lead to truly original ideas?

Beach Photo Writing Prompt

Picture taken from office.microsoft

 I don't know about you, but with the weather getting warm, it makes me want to hit the beach right now! I do have a family vacation scheduled for some beach time in June, but that seems so very far away. I decided to put all that longing for the warm sandy beach into a writing exercise with a photo I found online. The photo lead to a great funny short story for me. Now it's your turn. What does this picture say to you?

Two Short Stories Worth Reading

In the year of 2011, I headed up a project for our writer's group. It was a collaboration of 12 authors who came together with the common goal of compiling an anthology of short stories with a theme of December 32nd. It was a wonderful experience that lead me to deeper friendships with already great friends and gave me a new appreciation for the writing process. The project was a roller-coaster of deadlines, successes, critiques, correspondence and working towards a common goal. Unfortunately the anthology project disbanded at the beginning of 2012, because of conflicting goals and writing processes, but out of the experience came something unexpected.

The Passive Voice

Everyone talks about passive voice, but what is it exactly? How can it be made to work to benefit a piece of writing and when should it be avoided all together? When is a piece too passive? 

Passive voice occurs when the subject of a sentence is neither a do-er or a be-er. The subject exists, but not focused on. The real emphasis happens- when it is the most important- to the thing acted upon, or when the actor is not important.

Book Spotlight: The Write Brain Workbook

Over the Christmas Holidays, as part of my Christmas gift, I purchased a bunch of writing books that I thought I'd find interesting and helpful with my writing. I purchased several on helping in the craft of writing, but I also wanted to make sure I got one dedicated solely to writing exercises, so I ordered the book The Write Brain Workbook: 366 Exercises to Liberate Your Writing  by Bonnie Neubauer

Want to Be More Creative? Bring Out the Inner Child

Image from Microsoft Office

Let's face it, creativity is the bread and butter of being a writer. It's the spark that gets the imagination going and is an essential part of coming up with something interesting to write about. It would stand to reason, then, if a writer has trouble coming up with ideas for writing, what a person really might be having problems with is creativity. This problem can be fixed by bringing out the inner child that resides in all of us.

More on Focused Freewriting

One of my lists of Focused Freewriting Questions

As I already discussed in The Amazing Benefits of Freewriting, practicing freewriting on a daily basis can open up writing in a wondrous way. This happens in the best way possible when freewriting is focused on a specific topic or question. The topic or question can be anything that you chose, but the more specific the question the better. Having a broad topic to work on can be more confusing than helpful, but allowing freedom to explore inside a narrowed topic or question allows for discovery that might be surprising and quite enlightening. Here's how I do it...

Taking Time Away From the Writing Journey

Don't you just hate it when something comes along to interrupt your writing journey? Everything is scheduled out, deadlines are set, motivation to rush full steam ahead is not a problem- then the unthinkable happens. You go on vacation (maybe not such a bad thing), work requires a lot of overtime, you have a family emergency, you get the Flu, or some other reason life takes a sidetrack that wasn't expected, or something that's just down right inconvenient for your writing journey. It makes you groan deep within, because you know you'll have to put your writing aside for a time in order to put your full focus onto the interruption.

The Amazing Benefits of Freewriting

There are many tools in a writer's toolbox, but none is as helpful as the simple practice of freewriting. It's something that I picked up in my writing journey, which I used- but never fully appreciated- until I learned how powerful it could really be. This happened after reading the book How to Be a Writer by Barbara Baig. Nearly all her exercises, in the 265 page book, uses different variations of simple freewrite and focused freewriting. After doing several of the exercises, I found that all the freewriting I’d done up to that point was really just a warm-up. I never took it to the next level, because I hadn’t realized I wasn’t doing freewriting nearly enough (it should be done everyday), or even asking the right questions to do focused freewriting.

Publication: Why the rush?

There are two kinds of writers; the ones who are published and the ones who are not. The ones that are published are constantly looking for new things to write about and launch into the world (they make it look so easy). Then you have the writers who aren’t published, looking at the published authors and saying, “that’s what I want.” So these unpublished or newly published writers race to break into the field, because it’s what's expected of them. 

Goals in 2012

It’s January 1^st once again and like the years before I want to reassess my goals and where I would like to go on my writing journey. After a Year in Review, I have come up with some things I want to accomplish in 2012 to better the craft of my writing. 

Read

The best way to get better at any craft is to study those who have gone before in the field you wish to know about. So if you want to learn to write what better way than by reading what others have written? Reading something every day is my goal, even if it’s as simple as a blog post. 

Write

How can a person get better at something when you don’t practice? You can’t, so that’s my next goal to write every day. A good friend of mine once told me that it takes approximately 10,000 hours working at something to really be good at it. Looks like I’ve got a ways to go. My plan is to put a decent sized dent in that 10,000 hour mark.

A Year in Review

It's actually a good thing that we have a built in system that insists that a person take stock in the past year and give thought to the coming year. I suppose the infamous January 1st isn't the only date that does this. Birthdays tend to have this effect on us too, especially the big 30, 40 and 50. It's these times of reflection and reassessment that help us understand what we've done and what still needs to be done. It forces us to take a hard look at ourselves and redefine our goals. So this is my attempt at taking a look back into the year to see what I have accomplished (or not accomplished) and where I should go from here.

Book Spotlight: How to Be a Writer

At the beginning of the month I picked up a book that drastically changed my way of thinking as a writer. It is why I took a bit of a hiatus from this blog so that I could focus on the book and what it had to offer. I have to say it has made a significant impact on me. Barbara Baig's How to be a Writer gave me what no other writing book or writing class had given me, permission to explore and experiment in my writing.

Taking a Break for Practice and Rediscovery

After a lot of thought and consideration, I have decided to halt my regular writing projects and deadlines to take a step back and reflect on my writing and writing practices. I have felt for some time a disconnect from my writing (and life in general) and need to get back in touch with these things. I have rediscovered an old technique of free writing and am taking it to the extreme by only doing free writing for the next few weeks until I have worked through some underlying issues and found solid ground to work from again.