Tuesday Tip: Get Outside
Tuesday tips is a category of posts here at Writerly Life that promises to offer concrete tips for improving or kickstarting your writing. The tips that fall into this category are the sorts that you can do today or even right now.
This week’s tip:
Get outside for inspiration.
It’s amazing what an indoor life I lead these days. I live in the city and I’m a writer, so that means there are whole days when I could hypothetically stay in my pajamas (not saying I do — I’ll leave that a mystery). Sometimes I look out the window and I’m amazed to see that the weather has changed or that the sun has set. I bet there are those among you who live similar indoor lives a lot of the time.
The good news is that at least on the East Coast, summer has finally arrived. The weather is beautiful and it’s time to enjoy it. Last weekend I went on a long hike with family and saw my hometown from a (small) mountaintop, and it filled me with a fresh new feeling. Just getting outside and allowing your mind to settle can be tremendously helpful for your writing; it can allow you to find beauty in your language, lengthen your attention span, and work out problems in your story.
So as you set your writing goals for the summer, consider building some much-needed outdoor time into your schedule. Take a walk in the woods, or just sit out on a park bench somewhere, taking in the light and the green of the trees. You’ll find yourself mysteriously refreshed — and your writing will benefit too.
Make a Timeline
I had a very productive writing workshop recently with friends, discussing part of my novel. Among the many useful suggestions I received was the tip to try seriously plotting out a timeline of my character’s life. While many stories are straightforward, linear, and don’t have many jumps in time, my novel uses flashbacks and has chapters set in the past, during characters’ childhoods, and I realized I had been significantly fudging the dates, keeping it very blurry about when this and that happened. Keeping time too blurry when the past and the present are both important can be a way of manipulating your reader — in a bad way. It’s important to keep the reader able to understand the way the past and the present are talking to each other in your story.
My suggestion for this week, therefore, is to try seriously plotting out the life of your character, or at least the relevant section of his/her life for your story. Today I wrote down my character’s age and then worked from the beginning on up, noting important years in the past when significant chapters occur. You can do the same thing to make sure your character’s life is clear in your head.
If you don’t get a timeline done at some point, you may find yourself missing key time mistakes, like treating two siblings as though they are two years apart in one chapter and five years apart in another, or claiming that a historical event happened when the narrator was fifteen, when really it happened when he was eight. These sorts of things can cause you to lose the reader’s trust. So for goodness’ sakes, get it clear in your head, and to do that, get it clear on paper!
Photo of the Week
You can’t go wrong with a tiger photo for a striking image. Hopefully it will get you thinking dramatic or naturalistic things this week!
Photo of the Week
There’s a beautiful, dreamy poppy field for you to enjoy for this week’s inspirational photo. Who might come walking across this field?
This week’s guest post offers some resources on writing by some of the best writers in the business.
Learning from the Best: Top Writing Books Penned by Master Authors
Every writer’s goal is to become better at writing. That is, every writer dreams of creating content that makes a difference in someone else’s life. While some writers put a lot of focus on comma usage and other points related to grammar, others are more concerned with giving real meaning to the words they string together.
In reality, if a writer wants to do either of these things, he/she must set a goal of becoming extremely efficient at writing. Gifted writers learn to develop their skill. They write on a regular basis, and they know and take advantage of the time of day or night that they are most creative. In addition to these things, writers read and they learn from master authors.
Writers gain inspiration from their surroundings, from the people in their lives, and from the books they read. If a writer identifies with a writing style or technique used by a master author, that style can and should be adapted and used in the writer’s own work.
Seeking out ‘how to’ information from master authors is a way to build confidence and to help learn valuable tips that can help define a writing career. Below are some examples of top writing books by celebrated authors.
Now that a new month has begun, a new issue of the truly excellent Writerly Life newsletter has appeared. If you haven’t subscribed yet, now is the time! Subscribers to the completely free newsletter get a weekly update of the top posts, as well as a monthly message about the writing life, the best posts of the past month, and an exclusive preview of what posts are coming up next month. That’s not all, though — every monthly newsletter includes a writing exercise for you to try, as well as all sorts of extra inside information.
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How to Start Your Memoir Right
Memoirs can’t rely on memory
the way a computer does.
It’s the beginning of the summer — and that means it’s time to launch new projects into the water. That might mean a big new editing quest, an earnest effort to get published, or a journey into a completely new form. Many beginning writers I know use the summer as a chance to start new books — and plenty of writers are considering a start with a memoir.
Memoir has taken off in the book world in recent years. It was once thought only the realm of the old and accomplished; people argued that young people hadn’t experienced enough of note to write much of anything. They have a point — I, for one, don’t feel justified in writing a memoir quite yet — but I have read several truly lovely memoirs by writers who are just starting out. Sometimes you can’t embark in the world of fiction until you’ve made sense of where you come from. Here a few tips for making sure you avoid common pitfalls of memoir writing, and to make sure you do access what’s most important in the genre.
1. Don’t play the victim
There’s nothing more irritating than a memoir that is whiny, or that spends its time blaming everyone else for the narrator’s problems. The people in your life may have wronged you in various ways, but no one wants to read about your parental issues or why everything is everyone else’s fault. A memoir is your place to be honest; if it’s to succeed, then you must be honest about your own role in how your life has gone. The most important quality a memoir writer must possess (or learn to acquire) is the quality of being clear-eyed about the past. What went wrong, and how did it go wrong? What hand did you play? Don’t give us a story that has you moving passively through life, having endless slights and injuries pressed onto you.
Photo of the Week
The photo of the week has returned, writers, just in time to get you inspired for the summer! This week’s is a stunning water shot that looks eerily smoky. Enjoy — and get writing about it.
What Writerly Tools Will You Use?
I’ll be away this Memorial weekend visiting family, so you can expect a slight lull in the posts. But that doesn’t mean you’re on vacation — and neither am I! I’m posing an important question to you in this post that will hopefully keep you on track over the next few days. The question is:
What Writerly Tools Will You Use?
We’ve discussed in previous posts the idea of a writer’s “tool box.” It is a metaphor I first saw in Stephen King’s excellent book, On Writing. The idea is that you have certain tools at your disposal. You’re more skilled with some tools than with others, so you need to learn to use those tools you have more creatively, and avoid the ones you’re shaky on. It’s also a reminder for what tools you really have — and usually, you have more tools than you think.
For example, you might be very good at capturing realistic dialogue. Maybe you have an ear for conversation. If so, why did you write a chapter with no dialogue in it? You’ve got to pull the old dialogue wrench out of your tool box and use it. You have the tool of plot and suspense — maybe you know how to create a nice gripping cliffhanger. If so, use it! That’s a tool that writers rely on heavily.
The question for you this weekend, therefore, is all about what tools you’ll try pulling out of the old box. What is being underused? What does the story need? What have you neglected? What’s a little shaky or rusty or poorly put together? It’s time to work on it with the tools you have. This exercise requires a little self-examination as well; you need to take the time to discover your own writing style, and figure out what tools you really know how to wield. If you’re busy with family or vacationing this weekend, just thinking about your own writing will do. Try to understand what you can do and what you can’t. Read something good and figure out what parts of the book you could do better. That will give you a better understanding of what tools are already in your box, and what tools you need to get in there.
Tuesday Tip: Name Your Chapters
Tuesday tips is a category of posts here at Writerly Life that promises to offer concrete tips for improving or kickstarting your writing. The tips that fall into this category are the sorts that you can do today or even right now.
This week’s tip:
Name Your Chapters
I have a separate file for each of the chapters of my novel. It’s just easier to manipulate a shorter document, and it helps remind me to give each chapter its own arc, climax, and sense of satisfaction. I’ve been returning to these chapters now, trying to edit the novel on a macro level, shuffling chapters around and trying to figure out the overall trajectory. It was getting confusing; I was losing focus, and I didn’t know where the novel should end up. I was even getting confused about which file was which, so I set myself the task of naming each chapter, with just a word or two that would capture the essence of that chapter. And something miraculous happened once I had done this — the overall plot, and many of the big story arcs I was struggling with, suddenly seemed clear. I could see how one chapter (childhood) was repeating the work of another (childhood II); I combined them. One chapter (“kids”) needed to go earlier. And one chapter, named for the protagonist’s brother, would be a triumphant kind of climax.
Whatever your naming scheme ends up being, I highly recommend taking the time today to name your novel’s chapters. These names might not make it to the final draft — instead, they are for you alone. They are your chance to get it straight, to understand what each chapter is fundamentally supposed to be about. Once I realized one chapter was named the protagonist’s brother, than I knew that chapter had to be all about him and his perspective on things. This simple process ended up solving a lot of my problems.
