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Posts by Carol Despeaux Fawcett

Jul 3

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Try Scapple for mind mapping your writing ideas

In an earlier post, I wrote about the power of clustering to generate new ideas. Normally, I use paper and pen because there’s something about writing my ideas out longhand that gets my synapses flaring. But recently I discovered Scapple, an online tool that helps you get ideas down on the page and then make connections between them.

Scapple is for Mac and sold by Literature & Latte, the people who created Scrivener. You can use Scapple as a mind mapping tool or not. The program doesn’t force you to make specific connections. It doesn’t expect you to start out with one central idea off of which everything else is branched. There’s no built-in hierarchy–every note is equal, so you can connect them however you like. Read more

Jul 1

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Use Camp NaNoWriMo to reach your writing goal this month

Want to write a novel in the month of July? Well, now you can thanks to Camp NaNoWriMo. Based on November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Camp NaNoWriMo provides the online support, tracking tools, and hard deadline to help you write the rough draft of your novel in a month… other than November.

Not ready to write a novel in a month? No problem. You can use the support and deadlines of Camp NaNoWriMo to set other big writing goals–edit a manuscript, finish a first draft or finish a second draft. I even know a man who’s going to use this month to write one new poem a day.

Whatever your writing goals this month, check out the website and see how you can use it to reach your targets.

While you’re at it, check out these past links about how to write a novel in a month:

NaNoWriMo or not, boost your word count

How keeping a writing practice list can increase your NaNoWriMo word count

Jun 27

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How to remain an artist once we grow up, part one

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up – Pablo Picasso

This quote by Picasso is touched upon in a delightful Ted Talk given in 2006 by Sir Ken Robinson who says our education system is designed to educate the creativity out of children.

When we’re children we’re curious and play without inhibitions. The world is our secret garden. Once we go to school and become educated, we worry about “making mistakes.” We worry about whether or not we have the “right answers.” This worry about being correct all the time kills our creativity and our spontaneity. Read more

Jun 25

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The power of clustering to generate writing ideas

Recently, I’ve been toying with an idea for a creative nonfiction piece that I want to enter in an upcoming writing contest, but I’m having a difficult time getting all the threads down. After reading about different plot tools in author Holly Lisle’s “Create a Plot Clinic,” I decided to try her idea of clustering to expand on my idea. 

Lisle says, “To cluster, you write a word, a phrase, or a question, draw a circle around it, draw an arrow, write the first word, phrase or question that comes to your mind in relation to the first circle, and keep writing and drawing until you’ve formed a web.” This technique is also called mind mapping, and I’ve used it before but then sort of forgot about it.

So I pulled out my yellow pad and pen (colored pencils and drawing paper are fun, too) and wrote my original idea in the center of my paper and circled it. From there, I drew lines and other circles and wrote down the first words that came to me. Within a half hour, I had my entire piece outlined in the mind map.

Here’s a picture of what it looked like when I was done (don’t be frightened off from my handwriting–it comes from my paralegal days):  Read more

Jun 19

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Write scenes a beat at a time

In Sandra Scofield’s The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer,the author defines the term “beats” as small units of character action and reaction.

Beats are, “the way we break down events into small steps of action, making it possible to evaluate whether those steps move the action effectively toward the culmination of the scene.”

Scofield recommends jotting down the beats of each scene before we write or before we revise in order to have a clear vision of where the scene is going. If we have a sticky or muddy scene, this exercise can help clarify the scene and make it stronger. Having the beats of a scene clearly thought out also makes it easier to control pacing and review the logic of the scene. Read more

Jun 17

Find writing success in small, daily actions

It is a universal law that you must express your power

or the power will turn against you. What do you choose? 

—Michele Jamal, Shape Shifters:

Shaman Women in Contemporary Society

The above is one of my favorite quotes because it reminds me to express my power or be my “gift” each and every day. We all have gifts—a light that we uniquely bring to the world—but we don’t always display or use our gifts.

Recently, I was reading “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy, the publisher of Success magazine, and realized how easy it is to ride along in life and not make the daily little choices we need to make in order to allow our gifts to shine. I spent much of my early adult life just going with the flow and letting others make choices for me. Because I wasn’t proactively living my life, life was living me.

You know what I mean and, if you don’t, here are some examples:

  • Did I really inhale that bag of potato chips without even thinking about it? Read more

Jun 11

Using storytelling in writing: Two examples

Are you a storyteller? I come from a long line of storytellers. They’re not necessarily writers (in fact, I believe I’m the first “writer” in the family tree), but they are serious tellers of stories.

I wrote about my family’s storytelling in my memoir. In one scene, I’ve just come home from 4-H camp with a sprained ankle and my father has met me in the parking lot of our grocery store with bad news about my cousin and best friend, Susan. Read more

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