Oct 8
Learn about Margaret Atwood’s creative process in the 4-minute video below. I love her metaphor of using a rolling barrage to help you write your novel. I’ve done this and it works!
Write something truly awful to find the good stuff. That’s what poet Brendan Constantine promotes in his post “Idle Hands are the Poet’s Playground: Brendan Constantine on Taking a Chance.”
“Furthermore, it will always be true that our poorest work lies ahead of us. We’re going to write something truly awful in the future. We have to. Why do we have to? It’s often the only way to uncover the good writing. Like going through a kitchen drawer, sometimes we have to take out things we don’t need in order to get at the things we do.” Read more
Oct 3
Ian McEwan, who wrote Atonement and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize, describes in this 3-minute video how he develops ideas and finds inspiration for his writing, including a technique he uses to “force ideas.”
McEwan’s most recent book Sweet Tooth: A Novel
If you’re looking for a writing topic, do what poet and short story writer Raymond Carver did.
Carver wrote about people and situations that made a lasting emotional impression on him.
In an interview with Nicholas O’Connell for the book, At the Field’s End: Interviews With 22 Pacific Northwest Writers, published in 1987, Carver said the stories and poems he’d written were not autobiographical but have a starting point in the real world.
“Stories don’t just come out of thin air; they come from someplace, a wedding of imagination and reality, a little autobiography and a lot of imagination,” Carver said in the interview. Read more
Below are two blog posts I found particularly inspiring and enlightening in my writing life this week. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
New York Times bestselling author Bob Mayer’s post from last year: Pay the Writer makes so much sense. He writes about how we teach others how to treat us. This is true whether you’re speaking at a writing conference or setting aside quiet time to write at home. The video by Harlan Ellison is a hoot.
From last month, a post by my blog partner, Carly Sandifer, about finding inspiration in a commencement speech given by author Neil Gaiman.
Enjoy!
“Start a story now before your mouth talks it away.”
I love this line from the blog of authors and writing mentors Robert Ray and Jack Remick. Sometimes, authors do talk too much about their works-in-progress. We talk about not having enough time to write. We talk about plot or character problems we’re having. We talk, talk, and talk until we’ve worn ourselves and our listeners out.
Not all talk is good therapy. Sometimes, silence really is best. We can talk away the energy of a project and talking can be a way of avoiding what we should really be doing–writing. When I start to fall into this trap, I think of the quote above. Read more
In a Scripts & Scribes interview with literary magazine Tin House editor Rob Spillman, he said one thing that influences him to publish a submission is an author who writes with authority.
Writing with authority means ensuring that the tone, details and language of your story are confidently written so that readers are willing to live in the world you’ve created.
Writing with authority covers so many aspects of writing that — done well — you’re more likely to attract the attention of editors and agents. Here are some tips:
Be believable. Believable isn’t the same as boring or predictable. But characters and plot need to be realistic in the realm of the story you’re writing about. You’ll knock your reader right out of the story world you’ve created if you present a story line that doesn’t ring true.
“Nix stereotypes and the dreaded deus ex machina, in which a critical problem is suddenly solved with a contrived addition of a new event, superpower, object, or character.” Read more
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