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Posts from the ‘Writing Life’ Category

Oct 9

Daydream your way to creativity

My mother tells me that when my brother was in elementary school, she would come home from teacher conferences in tears because she didn’t get a good report from my brother’s teacher. Apparently, my brother wasn’t paying attention in class. He was staring out the window. He was daydreaming.

As it turns out, daydreaming can be a creativity tool. And it has other benefits too. It can relieve stress and lower blood pressure.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re trying really hard to think of how to fix something or move forward in your writing, you just get more stuck and stressed out? Then when you give up and go on to something else, just let your mind drift, the solution pops into your brain? (This works when you’ve lost something too and are trying too hard to remember where you left it). Read more

Oct 8

Use a rolling barrage to help you write your novel via Margaret Atwood

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!

Oct 5

Discover your art as you go along

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

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Author Ian McEwan speaks about one technique for finding novel ideas

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 Novelis a love story, a spy novel, and a book about literature itself.

Oct 1

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Follow Raymond Carver’s example to find story ideas

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

Sep 28

Two blog posts to inspire your writing life

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!

Sep 26

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Start a story now before your mouth talks it away

“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

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