Oct 17
If you’re new to One Wild Word, you may have missed some of our earlier posts. Dip into some posts from the past and shake up your writing mind.
Write lyrically by reading poetry
Learn more about how poetry can be your bubble bath for a productive writing session. Read more
Have you considered going on a “power trip?” Not in that wild, crazy, dictator sort of way, but in a crazy good, creative idea way.
Todd Henry, author of the book, “The Accidental Creative: How to be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice,” writes about how to maximize the creative process to solve problems or maximize ideas in the work place. I like to use his advice to build out ideas for my writing projects.
One of his tips: Make time for periodic power hours.
He suggests stopping once a week, or whenever it feels right, to spend an hour generating ideas. I use the time to write out details about characters and where my story could go next. Power hours are also good for brainstorming ideas for book titles, considering possibilities for story structure, or drumming up character names. Read more
We all get into ruts and patterns. What we eat, what routes we take to get to work, and what we do once we get there — routines for going about each part of our day.
Routines have their place. They forge discipline and efficiency. They provide security and order.
But when was the last time you did something for the first time? Read more
Throughout history, artists have called their sources of inspiration many things: ego, God, muse, daemon, genius, angel, their higher-self, or as Edwin Land, American scientist and inventor once said, creativity is simply, “a brief cessation in stupidity.”
Most days I feel about as creative as a slug on a morphine drip.
I have to fight for my creativity. I have to force myself to stay in my chair and to stay writing. Some writers call it “bum glue”—writing something without getting up twenty times to stare longingly at the chocolate pudding inside the fridge.
Why is it so hard to stay focused? Usually there’s a reason.
Yes, I run my own business and I have a zillion busy things to do each day. And, trust me, I’ve used that excuse a zillion and a half times to avoid my writing. But why do I find so many excuses to avoid what I love to do most in the world? Mostly, I think, it comes down to fear.
How well do you know your characters? If you’re stuck or blocked in your writing, it may be a signal that you have more to discover.
Speaking at a workshop sponsored by the Nevada chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Susan Brown, author of “Hugging the Rock” and several other children’s books, said when she gets blocked, it helps to learn more about her characters. That in turn helps her raise the stakes of her story.
Brown suggested these writing exercises:
Tip 1: Write letters to your characters and then have them write back.
Through letters, Brown has learned interesting nuances about her characters that led to new plot twists. Read more
Choosing the right title is an art. Sometimes, titles come in a brilliant flash of insight. Sometimes, not. I write poetry so I’ve had years of practice with titles. With most poems, I can usually find an intriguing title fairly quickly. Not so with my memoir. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours trying to come up with just the right title. In the process, I’ve discovered a few things to think about when choosing a title. But first, I’ll share some of my title failures and why they failed (no laughing out loud!)
My memoir is the story of how, as a child, I used the intuitive gifts inherited from my Norwegian great-grandmothers to transcend my father’s dark legacy. Below are the titles I’ve used along the way, in order of appearance. (I’m sharing the bad first so you can see how I learned from my mistakes).
The Language of Thorns. Okay, yes, I’m a poet. This shows it by being too literary and dramatic. Read more
I’m a big fan of passion. I believe that whatever we do has to be done with passion. Maybe this is why my house is currently a certified disaster zone or why I’m behind on bookkeeping—because it takes me awhile to work up my passion for these tasks.
When you do something with passion, you do it for yourself and nobody else. You have an inner fire. I can tell when an author has passion—I feel it in their writing, in their words, in their images. They capture me.
I recently read a post on Photofocus.com by photographer Scott Bourne (@scottbourne) where he asked the question of his fellow photographers: “What if you concentrated on making only meaningful photos?” Bourne explores what this concept might mean to his body of work and encourages photographers to find what is meaningful to them as artists—not what they think is meaningful to others.
He writes, “There seems to be a rush to mediocrity in so many of the things that surround us lately that we may be in danger of simply forgetting about excellence.”
As writers, we have to be knowledgeable about the market—what’s selling, what’s not, how genres have shifted or combined to make new opportunities. But we don’t want to write to the market. We don’t want to write about vampires just because that’s the new hot trend (unless that’s truly your passion).
The most successful authors make their own trends. They find what they’re absolutely passionate about, what is most meaningful to them, and write about it. Read more
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