Tag: Writing

Do You Have A Daily Writing Schedule?

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[found on menwithpens.ca; by Kari]

“Successful writers write NO MATTER WHAT.” — Kelly Stone

“I’m not a self-schedule-oriented person. It’s far easier to stick to someone else’s schedule than your own. Self-discipline can be HARD.

So when James told me that I need a daily writing schedule, I balked.

I don’t want a schedule! I can’t guarantee where I’ll be at any single time. What if something else comes up? What if my child is home sick from school one day and I can’t write at my scheduled time? What if I’m not inspired at that time but get inspired later on?

Every excuse imaginable went through my head. I set a schedule anyways, just to be dutiful – I kept it for two days and then I quit.

James can’t be right all the time. What works for her may not work for me. Everyone does things differently, right? I need to find my own writing path…

Three months later, how much had I written? Well, let’s not talk specifics, but it wasn’t nearly as much as I’d wanted to achieve.

In fact, I was really embarrassed — even though no one knew about this but me.

I’m a writer, and a writer WRITES, but it’s pretty hard to believe you’re a writer when you lack proof to reinforce the claim.

Then James – damn her – sends me a book out of the blue. Ironically, it was Time to Write by Kelly Stone.

Sigh. FINE, I thought. I’ll read it.

Stone’s book discusses why writers need a writing schedule. They need to create a habit, and creating a writing habit means writing on a regular basis. By setting a particular time of day aside to write, you’ll practice your craft and reaffirm your belief that you are, indeed, a writer.

You reaffirm your commitment to yourself.

Stone says, “A schedule gives [writing] the same importance as your other must-do activities. Just like grocery shopping, picking up the kids from daycare, and putting in hours at your job, writing will become part of the natural flow of your day when you schedule it.”

My problem was that I wanted to wait for the “right time” to write. I waited to be inspired or to have “enough” time, a nebulous amount that changes depending on the situation. Occasionally I’d discover time to write, here or there, but instead of writing, I’d find myself staring at a blank page feeling like I’d forgotten the entire English language.

“Waiting for the right time to simply appear in your busy day is a guaranteed way to ensure that you won’t write because something else will come up… Suddenly it’ll be time for bed and you discover that another day has passed and you haven’t written.”

You said it, Kelly. Many nights I’d go to bed without having written at all that day, and I’d mentally beat myself up about it.

Fortunately, a little further in the book, Stone talks about how different authors use different types of writing schedules. She interviewed over 100 professional writers, from fiction authors to freelance journalists, to reveal their methods of incorporating writing into their lives.

What she discovered was that writers tend to choose one of these methods – which one fits you?

    • The Early-Morning Writer:  Rick Mofina, a crime novelist, considers writing in the early mornings a key to his success because his creativity was in top form. Waking up and writing before work was easier than writing after work, when he felt exhausted from his day.
    • The After-Hours Writer:  Carmen Green, author of Flirt and What a Fool Believes, begins after her job and childcare duties are over. She writes from about 7:30 to 10:00 pm and then gets ready for bed.
    • The Office Writer:  Novelist Steve Berry takes his laptop to work with him and writes before his co-workers arrive for the day. He also writes during scheduled lunch breaks and stays late at the office to write after his co-workers leave.
    • The Blitz Writer:  C. J. Lyons, author of Arrivals, says, “As a pediatrician I worked part-time, which was forty hours a week. Time to write was obviously scarce, so I would let my stories ‘ferment’ until I had a day off, and then the words would just flow.”
    • The Mini-blocks Writer:  Kathryn Lance, author of over fifty fiction and nonfiction books, balances her writing time and personal life in mini-blocks. “I used to write a minimum of one fiction sentence every night before going to bed. Or actually, before going to sleep — I did this in bed. I recommend that to people who just can’t find time to do their fiction.”
    • The Commuting Writer:  Rick Mofina also uses his commute time to help achieve his early morning writing goals, which is perfect for writers who use public transportation to and from work. “I use the commute to make notes, usually critical notes to myself, so I know where I’m going.”
    • The Any-Opportunity or Combo Writer:  Physician and bestselling novelist Tess Gerritsen wrote whenever she wasn’t on duty. “I would write on my lunch breaks, as well as after I got home. I’d write whenever I could — weekends, early mornings, and late nights. After I got home, as soon as the kids were put down for the night, I’d start writing.”

There were all types of writers! Inspired and repeating my new mantra (“successful writers write no matter what!”), I set up a schedule. A proper schedule I wanted to stick to. Finally.

Yeah, yeah, I know — James was right. Just don’t tell her I said that.

As a bonus, Time to Write also addresses problems that different writers have in sticking to their writing schedules, providing solutions and practical advice that work.

From needing more motivation to actually sitting down at your scheduled time to the issues that prevent you from being able to write in the first place (writer’s block) to gleaning inspiration from your daily life, she’s got it all covered, with backup: published authors who’ve lived through that exact situation attest to each solution. That way, you know that it works – and if it worked for someone else, it can work for you.

Now that I have a proper schedule, with clear goals, I accomplish far more each day than ever before. I’m not leaving my writing up to chance.

And my writing schedule is set in stone. I don’t schedule anything in that time because I need to build respect for my writing.

I’ve made my writing goals fairly easy to achieve, of course. That way, I can reach my daily goal quickly and then either stop or continue a little further. But I fully intend to change up my goals and make them more challenging as I build my writing habit and become comfortable with it.

One other thing James keeps reminding me — and yes, she’s definitely right on this one — is that my writing time needs to end on a positive note. If I’m exhausted at the end of my writing time stopped writing because I was stuck or ended thinking, “Well, that wasn’t great,” then at some point writing will become a chore. I’m simply not going to want to do it anymore.

By ending on an upbeat note, I feel good about what I’ve just achieved and look forward to writing the next day. It makes it a breeze.

What about you? Do you have a writing schedule you follow on a daily basis? How do you stay motivated to write consistently every day? What advice worked best for you when you started to incorporate writing into your daily schedule?”

[found on http://menwithpens.ca/writing-schedule]

Writing Tips From the Masters

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[found on openculture.com]
“Here’s one way to become a better writer. Listen to the advice of writers who earn their daily bread with their pens. During the past week, lists of writing commandments by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twitter. (Find our Twitter stream here.) So we decided to collect them and add tips from a few other veterans — namely, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. Here we go:

Henry Miller (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 the 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.

George Orwell (From Why I Write)

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Margaret Atwood (originally appeared in The Guardian)

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.
5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10. Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Neil Gaiman (read his free short stories here)

1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

William Safire (the author of the New York Times Magazine column “On Language”)

1. Remember to never split an infinitive.
2. The passive voice should never be used.
3. Do not put statements in the negative form.
4. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
5. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
6. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
7. A writer must not shift your point of view.
8. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
9. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
10. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
11. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
12. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
14. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
15. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
16. Always pick on the correct idiom.
17. The adverb always follows the verb.
18. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.”

[found on http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/writing_rules.html]

Did I Do That? Well, Obviously, I Meant To…

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“Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.” 

― Chris Baty

When Do You Stop Researching?

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[found on howtoplanwriteanddevelopabook.blogspot.com; by Mary Carroll Moore]

“A children’s book writer sent me the following question:  “I am interested in writing a non fiction book for 11-18 year olds and wanted to know how to go about preparing myself to do the research for the book efficiently?”  This writer had a timeline for her book and wanted to complete it by the beginning of December.

Research is both a blessing and a bane for the book writer.  It’s very easy to research now that the world is at our fingertips via the Internet.

But this wealth of resources also poses a serious side tracking problem:  How can you really tell when you’re researching and when you’re just avoiding writing?

I love to research.  I worked as an editor for a small press for 18 years and was constantly being asked to research this or that fact from different authors’ books.  I knew how to get online and sail through the mediocre listings into the really meaty facts.  I became good friends (via phone) with several reference librarians at my local library–always a good call to make when stumped by the various options on the Internet.  Librarians (mostly) love research and they are there to help.

But often I found myself cruising from one article to the next, opening more layers of links, and finding it hard to actually come back to the writing I was supposed to be working on.

Since someone was paying me to get the editing done, and I was under a deadline, I always forced myself away from the research eventually.  But when you’re writing your book, you may not have this outer-imposed structure.  You may be your only boss, creating your own timeline, as my reader above is.  How do you stay efficient with research and still get your book done?

Researching Your Readership
I have dozens of stories from students in my classes who discovered they were writing to the wrong readership–after they did some bookstore research.  One woman thought her novel was geared toward adults but after she spent an hour browsing the YA bookstore shelves, she realized her language, tone, and subject matter was really meant for younger reader, in their late teens, as she had been when she experienced the specific changes she was writing about.  Another student was preparing to finish his memoir when he did some belated bookstore research and realized he didn’t want his story on the memoir shelf–it was way too raw and dangerous emotionally for him to imagine his family members picking up a copy of a “true story” that contained their histories.  So he switched horses in midstream and became a novelist.This sounds basic, but many writers forget that bookstores (and online bookstores) hold a wealth of information to help us orient our book projects.  So researching your readership is first on the list.

For the reader who wrote me the question for this post, as someone writing a book for a certain age group, you really need to know your audience well.  What language do these readers prefer?  They may be much more sophisticated readers than you were at that age, or they may not be.  What do they learn in school–and is your topic too sophisticated or way to basic for them?

And if you’re delivering a certain topic and need scientific, cultural, political, or historical data, you need to translate what you research into wording that kids would understand, crafting your writing to lead them point by point through the material.

Research Information
After you’ve researched your reader and gone through the steps to explore your book’s topic, you may have the urge to spend time on the Internet, in the library, or in your own book collection, making sure your facts are in order.  This is really important, and it used to be the provenance of fact checkers at a publishers.  No more.  It’s now up to the writer, and publishing contracts have long clauses to make sure the writer holds all responsibility for errors of fact in their manuscript.I love to research place, and I do that early on in the research process for my books.  I physically visit the location of my book as many times as I can, read other books set in that location, and take lots of notes–especially sensory details like the way things sound, smell, and look in that setting.  It’s important to convey accuracy of place to allow the emotion within the place to touch your reader.  And, believe me, readers who are familiar with the place will let you know if you’ve made mistakes in reporting the details of their favorite locations.

Historical facts are also important to get right.  Watch out for the Internet on this one.  When I was a professional editor at the small press in the Midwest, we rarely accepted the first or even fifth Internet mention of a fact as truth.  It took lots of browsing and comparing notes from different sites.  If a fact was repeated frequently, then it was more likely true.  But I collected a list of my favorite fact-checking sites that seemed reliable, and they were the ones I visited most often.  University research sites, library databases, and reputable publications online were the ones I leaned on most–and I strictly avoided the chats, blogs, and personal opinion posts that could be just that.

Putting Research in Its Proper Place
Make sure, though, that research doesn’t take over your writing time.  It’s a great time waster for us creative types, especially with the Internet making the world of research so very accessible.  Hours (days!) can go by while you happily browse, and not one word of your book actually gets written.When I am deep in research, I set a kitchen timer.  When the timer rings, I stop–no matter how exciting that next link looks.  I go back to the writing, to the blank page, and do what I came here for.  It takes discipline to leave the candy store of research and actually write.  But it’s the only way to make a book.

This Week’s Writing Exercise
1.  Make a list of topics you’d like to research for your book project.  They could be more information on the setting you’re writing about, historical facts, readership research, or anything you are interested in that might enhance your story.2.  Practice disciplined research:  get a kitchen timer or set your cell phone alarm for 30 minutes.  Begin your research.  See if you can stop when the alarm goes off.  Make sure you make notes or print interesting pages.

3.  Make notes to remind you where you were, so you can return easily.

4.  Look over the research notes you’ve made.  Take a highlighter and underline sections that might be useful to inform a chapter, character, or focus of your book.”

[found on http://howtoplanwriteanddevelopabook.blogspot.com/2011/04/researching-your-book-how-to-do-it-when.html]

Beginners’ Blunders

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[found on writing-world.com; Marg Gilks]

“Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler

“You’ve written a great story, sent it out again and again, but it keeps being rejected. Why? What are some of the writing blunders you may be committing that set red “amateur” flags waving for agents and publishers — and invariably earn your story a rejection slip?

They’re Only Empty Words

Blonde bombshell, guns blazing, go the extra mile, passed with flying colors, under cover of darkness. Cliches like these pepper our everyday speech, but in a story, they’re a red flag. When you think about it, what information does a cliche convey to a reader? What does it mean to pass with flying colors? Why would a sexy woman be called a bombshell? What’s attractive about a bombshell? When you use cliches in your writing instead of creating original descriptions that actually engage the reader’s senses and emotions, you’re writing words that the reader will find very easy to forget.

Like cliches, empty modifiers like adjectives and adverbs are the sign of weak writing, produced by a writer without the imagination or the skill needed to create evocative descriptions that add depth to the story. Used to excess, they clutter up a story with empty words that distract the reader as she tries to envision an image that the words just aren’t conjuring.

Used in place of more vivid language, adverbs and adjectives are just as commonplace as cliches. “Fluffy white clouds” — ho-hum. Why not clouds that hang in the sky like dollops of whipped cream, or that are as plump as popcorn? “They moved quickly down the street.” How fast is quickly? Are they running, or speeding along in a car? If you replace the weak verb “moved” with one that’s more specific, you wouldn’t have to use the adverb “quickly” at all: They dashed down the street, or flew down the street on their bicycles.

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader — not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon,” said E.L. Doctorow, author of Billy Bathgate. A memorable story is one that readers experience. Get specific. Paint word pictures for your readers instead of falling back on tired phrases and descriptors, and you’ll create a story that publishers will want to share with their readers.

Tell Me No More!

Many beginning writers, faced with the dilemma of conveying background information or character details to the reader, go the obvious route — they throw it all at the reader in a big, expository lump of facts often called an “info dump.” They tell the reader everything.

Readers pick up a story to be entertained, not to be lectured. Nobody likes to be told what to think; like you, readers want to form their own opinions. Whenever possible, show the reader what she needs to know about a character or a society or a setting — persuade her to form an opinion that matches your goals in writing the scene or creating the character. If you have to resort to telling, feed it to the reader in manageable bits, woven into the story here and there, so the reader doesn’t realize she’s learning anything.

“Okay,” you think, “the reader needs to know what my character looks like, so I’ll have him look in a mirror, and describe what he sees.” Or: “Well, if two of my characters tell each other what the reader needs to know, then that’s showing because it’s dialogue, not exposition.”

Don’t. Neither solution is effective showing, it’s telling with props — and such a common blunder among beginners that the techniques themselves are considered cliches: “Sarah looked in the mirror and saw a pretty red-haired girl with green eyes and a freckled nose staring back at her.” Do you look in the mirror and see that? Or do you notice you need a shave or a haircut, or grin to examine your teeth? If you’re not noticing your physical description, your character wouldn’t naturally notice this, either.

“As you know,” you have one of your characters say, “we have been walking through this desert for the past five days, and it is quite hot. We have no water — we’ll have to find some soon, or we’ll die.” To which your other character responds, “Indeed. You know I’m the world’s foremost expert on skin cancer, and these sunburns can’t be doing us any good at all.” Are you laughing yet? I hope so! Nobody talks like this. So don’t make your characters say things they wouldn’t say naturally, just for the sake of conveying information.

Inept showing like this is just as bad as an info dump, and will earn you a rejection just as quickly. As with avoiding empty words, put a little more effort into how you convey information to the reader, so it becomes an experience, not an effort to read.

Head-hopping

You’ll probably notice when reading a contemporary novel that the story seems to be told in the voice of only one character. If there seems to be more than one character telling the story — different viewpoints — if you pay close attention to each scene within that novel, you’ll probably find that only one character seems to be sharing his or her perceptions of events in the scene with the reader. The character whose eyes readers see story events through, whose thoughts the reader “hears” in a scene or throughout a story or novel is called the point of view character. This is called “limited” point of view, and it’s the most common form you’ll see, because today’s readers like getting right inside a character’s head to experience the story.

The point of view (POV) that most novice writers fall into, however, is “omniscient” point of view. In this point of view, the narrator is all-knowing and all-seeing, popping from one character’s head into another, making the reader privy to everyone’s thoughts and everything that’s going on, even if that activity is off-stage, in the past or in the present or in the future. There is a lot of explaining — the omniscient narrator tells the reader what everyone is thinking and what is going on.

Sounds pretty good, huh. Look at that description of omniscient point of view again — the narrator is telling. Telling instead of showing is one of those red flags for rejection, remember? With omniscient, you are leaving nothing to the reader’s imagination. You’re not allowing the reader to participate, to experience, but merely to observe. For this reason, while omniscient POV is a legitimate point of view, it has fallen out of favor with today’s readers.

If point of view hops from one character to another within a scene in your novel or story, it will be perceived by an agent or publisher as poor writing. Manipulating point of view to best effect or maintaining it consistently takes attention and practice, but it’s one skill that sets more experienced authors apart from novices, and well worth learning.

Mechanics

Yes, this is the icky stuff — the grammar and punctuation and spelling that you’d rather not think about. But agents and publishers think about it — in fact, it’s the quickest way for them to tell if a manuscript is worth anything beyond a cursory look. If, in that first glance, they see too many mechanical errors, they’re not likely to give the story itself a chance.

Agent Noah Lukeman, author of The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, cites misuse of the question mark — a common blunder — as reason enough for a rejection. “The same holds true for the exclamation point,” and, to a lesser degree, parentheses, he says. Think of it — a simple little question mark could doom your story.

Punctuation marks are the most obvious red flags. You also have to watch out for the sneakier grammatical pitfalls, like dangling or misplaced modifiers and passive voice. A misplaced modifier occurs when a word or phrase is placed next to a word that it can’t possibly describe: Growling furiously, jaws snapping, the hunter trussed the bear cub. It’s a good bet the writer intended the bear cub to growl and snap, but written this way, it’s the hunter! A dangling modifier happens when a word or phrase has been dropped: While eating lunch, the crocodile swam past the dock. If the croc wasn’t doing the eating, this sentence needs the lunchers to be complete — While we were eating lunch. Both of these grammatical blunders can create reader confusion at best or, at worst, unintentional humor at your expense.

What is passive voice? While active voice describes an action a character is doing, passive voice describes what is being done — it conveys no action: “she put the books on the shelf” as opposed to the passive “the books were put on the shelf.” The very structure of passive verbs suggests that an action took place in the past, not the present. Remember, today’s readers want to feel as if they’re right there in the story, experiencing events. Active voice is simpler, less wordy, and is more immediate.

Take the time to brush up on grammar and punctuation; take a moment to look up the correct spelling of a word you’re not sure of; go over your manuscript carefully when you’re done, correcting typos and any other small errors that may detract or distract. It’s worth the effort.

You’ve probably realized by now that writing a good story takes more effort than simply sitting down and dashing off the first words that come to mind. But more effort means a greater likelihood that the finished product will earn publication — not rejection slips.”

[found on http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/fiction10.shtml]