Skip to content

Sep 20

1 Comment

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.

Read more

Sep 19

1 Comment

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.

Read more

Sep 15

3 Comments

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

1 Comment

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

Sep 13

1 Comment

Two tips to build characters and jumpstart your plot

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

Sep 12

1 Comment

Four tips to choosing a book title

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

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →