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Sep 22

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When do you call yourself a writer?

Some days, it seems as if everybody thinks they’re a writer. A few years back I was visiting my mother-in-law in Cherry Valley, California, where I spent the mornings writing at a local Starbucks. As I sat outside sipping my latte and working on my laptop, at least five people a day approached me to ask what I was doing. When I said I was a writer, most of the people proceeded to sit down and tell me their own writing dreams. Guess I just have one of those faces.

One woman, a teacher, hoped to retire and write full time. One man had already published a technical book but really wanted to write fantasy. Another man said, “Oh, my sister is a writer, too.” When I asked him what she wrote, he replied, “Oh, nothing yet. But she’s going to start soon.” Read more

Sep 21

Test your manuscript to see if it’s a page turner

Why are some books so riveting, while others are just okay? What qualities of a story make you want to stay up all night reading even when you know the dreaded alarm will be going off at o’dark thirty?

If your goal is to write a page turner (and whose isn’t?), test your memoir, short story, or novel against these criteria to see how close you’ve come.

1. Create characters readers will care about.  Grab your readers’ attention with fully developed characters. If readers are attached to the characters, empathize, or even hate a character, they’ll want to know what happens next.

2. Make sure that something important is at stake. What does your protagonist stand to lose or gain?

3. Start chapters with a sense of drama, mystery, or trouble. Create curiosity. It helps to start with your manuscript’s first line.

In “After the Game,” from Selected Stories, author Andre Dubus begins: “I wasn’t in the clubhouse when Joaquin Quintana went crazy.” Read more

Sep 20

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Three ways to feed your muse: writing away procrastination, Part 3

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.

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Sep 19

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Try this revision trick to polish your prose

Are you deep into revisions? Maybe you know you need to cut a few of your little darlings. Or maybe a few thousand? Whatever the case may be, here is one technique from Jane Yolen, the legendary children’s and young adult author.

Take a chapter of your manuscript and break it up into breath spaces as though it were a poem. Read more

Sep 16

How to make your book’s setting come alive

Ever read a novel that you were really into and then suddenly hit a dry patch of description that made you start to nod off? I have. If the story is really good, I might put up with it and skim over those parts. But if the story isn’t stellar, the author is in grave danger of losing me.

I used one of author and writing teacher James Scott Bell’s tips when I began writing my memoir. Though I grew up in the small town featured in my memoir, I visited the area again once I started writing the story, snapping pictures and traipsing through back roads.

Through research and immersing myself in the location, I discovered interesting facts about our town that I didn’t know growing up. It was helpful to go back, because as an adult and a writer, I have a different perspective.

Bell has produced a short video on how to make your setting and writing come alive. He gives tips for turning your setting into a character.

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Sep 15

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Find your story’s emotional throughline

Even though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, an incident as a teenaged babysitter taught me one of my first lessons about subtext and story.

I was babysitting a nine-year-old boy who was literally out of control, a human tornado. He wouldn’t listen. I had plenty of babysitting experience, but I’d never dealt with a child like this. At one point, he found a cigarette lighter and before I could grab it from him, he’d flicked it on and burned his hand.

Later that day, after I had gone home and was walking down the street with a friend, the boy’s mother drove by. She stopped and started screaming at me about her son’s injury. While it wasn’t good that he had hurt himself, her response was extreme for the superficial nature of the burn. I tried to explain how hard it was to manage him, but she just drove away. Read more

Sep 14

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How to fully imagine your memoir

As I recently edited my memoir for the umpteenth time, I struggled over how to best fill in certain blanks in my family history. I didn’t want to present information I didn’t know as true. And I wasn’t out to embellish anything —not a good thing to do in memoir—but I lacked important information.

I remembered reading Debra Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild In the Middle of Nowhere,and how she handled information missing in her family tree. I went back to her book to see what she’d done. Here’s an excerpt: Read more

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