Photo of the Week
*, originally uploaded by caballosblancos.
I’ve never seen Stonehenge, but this is a great, mysterious image of it that evokes its tremendous antiquity. Try writing something about this view this week.
Time To Make Your Writing Plan for Fall!
It may still feel like 90 degrees outside with 100 percent humidity, but it’s actually time to get started on your plan for autumn. My favorite season is right around the corner, and as always it’ll bring many changes for my routine and schedule. As a grad student, I’m still on that academic schedule that I’ve been on since I was in kindergarten, taking the summers off to laze around and then leaping headlong into activity and work again in the fall. I know not everyone gets the luxury of this schedule, but nevertheless, a new season is always a chance to start fresh. So here are a few goals you could set for your writing life for the fall.
It’s publishing season! Swing into literary magazines.
Many literary magazines take the summer off and don’t accept submissions. But they spring back into action in the fall; not only do they read stories, they also have many fiction and poetry contests at this time. So dust off your resume, polish off that story you’ve tweaked over the summer, and send it out to a few places. Save your rejections and send more work to magazines that encourage more in their notes.
A new season brings new story ideas!
So you’ve been fiddling with that one story all summer, writing a paragraph here and there, tweaking and rearranging and polishing. That’s all well and good, but a new season brings a chance for that rare spark of new-story energy. As I change my milieu and head back to school in the fall, I often get a rush of new creative thoughts and ideas. Those ideas shouldn’t go to waste just because I’m still working on an old draft. So in the fall, I put aside old work and try writing fresh for a while, following my creative energy wherever it takes me.
Read, read, read.
Another important aspect of fall, at least for me, is a return to a more studious mindset. I’ve let myself get a little mentally lax over the summer, but the fall brings a chance to return to my old sharpness. One of the ways to do that is to return to a regular reading schedule. It’s time to get through that stack of books on my shelf that I haven’t read. Sometimes it can help to boil it down to a very mathematical equation. Count the number of chapters in a book you want to read, so that you’ll know how many days you should take to finish it. Then make sure you read at least a chapter of the book a day. It will keep you thinking about writing and reading a little each day, and it will get you more excited to do that new story writing yourself.
Are you gearing up for autumn? How are you doing it? What goals are you setting for yourself this season?
How to Use an Illness in Your Story
Illness, like many other stressful experiences, can become a real testing ground for the strength of a person’s character. If illness plunges a character into despair, it might make you wonder how thin their veneer of happiness was before the illness ever occurred, or on what shaky grounds it rested. If a person surprises you and tackles the illness with fortitude and optimism, that, too, can be very revealing about a person’s inner attitude toward life. For these reasons, illness, or physical symptoms or problems, can be a very useful thing to pull into a story and test your characters.
This week, try putting more stress on the situation you’ve created in a story by having the threat of serious illness or even death looming over the scene. Is someone waiting for test results? A certainty that this is a terminal case? Even the nagging worries of a hypochondriac can add tension and sense of mortality to a scene. As I wrote last week, keep your reader uncomfortable by making him worry about your character’s wellbeing. And this illness will force you to ask some tough questions of yourself and your character. What would he do when pushed to the limit? How would he react to relentless, unresolvable pain? To the possibility of death? To the certainty of it? Ask the tough questions, and observe how the psychology of a person can change when an illness crashes into a normal life.
Read Books that Excite You
There are plenty of good books out there, but not all books are ones that will get you writing. What you should be reading are books that actually excite and challenge you with their writing and their ideas, that get you longing to write, that make you wish the book would never end. Are you reading competent fiction, or exciting fiction? Here are a few books I’ve read recently that have gotten me excited to do my own writing.
Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
This book isn’t for everyone. In fact, I’m often turned off by sadism, misogny, or excessive cynicism in a book, and this shocking novel has all three. And yet…this book challenges me, takes me out of my comfort zone, and keeps me reading with the electric energy of its writing. It is an absolutely stunning work of bitterness about the human condition and psyche. It is an agonizing portrait of apathy, lack of compassion, and the lowest, blackest impulses of the human spirit being induleged and tolerated. And yet it captures the nightmarish chaos following World War I better than any other postwar novel I know. You will be electrified by the voice, the nervous energy quivering through it, the shades of dream and nightmare that seem to leak into reality.
After the jump: two more books to get you hopping.
Review: Pilot Dr. Grip Pen
Image from samsclub.com
As part of my new category about the tools of a writer’s trade, I’d like to introduce you to a tool I couldn’t do without — the Pilot Dr. Grip retractable pen.
First let me explain why this pen in particular has so completely won me over. Even though I love pens, they’ve never loved me. Maybe it’s because I’m a lefty, but pens have never worked satisfyingly for me. Fountain pens will give me a watery little trickle and then stop completely. Other fancy pens won’t even start, no matter how many times I vainly scratch or swipe at the paper. Other pens that are supposed to guarantee a smooth flow, like gel pens, inevitably work well for about five minutes, then start to show gaps in parts of letters. It’s incredibly frustrating. Sure, a good old Bic ball point will work, but it doesn’t look elegant or feel satisfying. I’ve been longing for a high quality pen for years, and never had one that didn’t become spotty just weeks after getting it.
Enter the Pilot Dr. Grip pen. I first got this beauty in my Christmas stocking, and I was immediately blown away by the writing experience. It’s a pleasantly weighty pen, excellently balanced in your hand, with an elegant design and smooth rubber grip. It is technically a ball point pen, but with a smoother, darker flow of ink than I’ve ever had from a ball point. It feels like a fountain pen — but manages like a ball point. The ink flows so smoothly, with almost no scratching, that it soon became my go-to pen for all important writing. This pen saw me through four years of college exam blue-book writing, an entire notebook of notes on new stories, and much more before I needed to change the ink cartridge. More than any other pen I’ve had, this one made me feel like hand-writing was effortless and fun again.
While everyone’s pen experience is different, I can tell you I’ve gotten three of these pens now and won’t use any other for my important writing. I highly recommend the pen and would like to see it in other colors. Right now I’ve only found it in black, but the design of the pen itself comes in a variety of colors.
Photo of the Week
Melancolía, originally uploaded by anpegom.
This open space seems desolate — or perhaps ominous. There’s a lot of meaning that could be read into this beautiful image. What do you think?
How to Keep Your Reader Uncomfortable
Keep us worried and anxious for
your character.
There’s a funny truth about most of the world’s great novels and stories: they don’t keep you feeling warm and fuzzy on every page. In fact, most of them are working very hard to keep you feeling decidedly uncomfortable all day. Good novels don’t want you reassured that the world is normal and everything is preceding swimmingly, that this rough patch will soon be replaced by a picnic by the lake. No, they want you feeling worried for the character’s welfare. They want you to be biting your nails. It’s a quick and easy way to make your reader feel more invested in the story, cheering for the character, and anxious to find out what happens next. Here are a few ways to keep your reader anxious.
The world is not perfect: small signs of decay.
Modern life is complicated; it’s just not the case that when one bad thing happens, all other things put themselves on hold and wait in line. No, bad things tend to happen in clusters rather than one by one. So while it’s important not to jam-pack your story with too much artificial drama, it’s a good idea to have small, annoying problems cropping up. The main problem might be a looming divorce, but maybe someone’s child is doing poorly in school, and the parents are getting old and infirm. Small things remind us that this is the real world, where our problems come at us whether we’re ready or not.
After the jump: more ways to keep your reader climbing the walls!
A few weeks ago I wrote a post that a lot of readers identified with. I was dealing with some stressful situations in my life, and I wrote about How to Write Under Stressful Conditions. In the post, I talk about keeping your creative life going even under the most trying circumstances. After all, your writing can be what makes you feel the most like you. Readers agreed and had a lot to say about the importance of getting back in the saddle. Margaret Fieland said:
I can really relate to this post — and you have some excellent ideas here. One thing that helps me in stressful times is just to journal about anything at all, even about how I’m having so much trouble writing, can’t think of anything to write about, feel guilty, etc. Just the mere act of picking up my pen and writing seems to help unstop the dam.
Thanks, Margaret. Absolutely, writing can serve as a great form of catharsis for our stress and negative emotion. It’s a way to get things out of our system, even if the writing that results isn’t the best. When you’re a writer, you feel calmer and braver and wiser just from the act of writing. I recommend Margaret’s exercise for others — during a stressful time in your life, make a daily writing goal in a journal, even if it’s only a few sentences a day. It’ll help keep you going.
Donita said:
What you said about not feeling guilty is vital. Guilt gums up your brain and raises your stress level. Guilt can create a solid block that’s hard to crash through. My own life is a series of crises, big and small. I’ve had to learn to write no matter how horrible things were. So, what I do is write every day, no matter what. I set a minimum of 300 words (not a lot)). It doesn’t have to be good; it can be drivel. It just has to be words, and it has to be in the project I’m working on. I can always delete it on another day. Today marks 400 days in a row of writing through crisis and calm. It works for me.
Thanks, Donita. That was another part of my post that I felt very strongly about — sometimes guilt stops us from writing because it is an activity for ourselves. If someone we love is suffering, writing can seem selfish. But it’s vital that you keep trying to write. Writing will get you in a more generous and clear-headed state, which will enable you to help your loved one more. Take care of yourself during a stressful period, and don’t let guilt get you down!
After the jump: more strategies for writing under stressful conditions.
I’m happy to report that the accolades have just been pouring in lately for Writerly Life. The International Blogging Recognition Council has picked this site as a featured blog. Here’s the information I received:
During the month of July, the International Blogging Recognition Council (IBRC) had the pleasure of reviewing your blog Writerly Life. Your blog was referred to IBRC through our Refer-A-Blog program. “How To Avoid Clumsy Writing” was the topic that the Council reviewed. Based on the review, the Council has recommended that your blog receive IBRC’s designation of “Recognized Blog”. IBRC reserves this honor to those blogs that effectively connects with the audience and promotes the sharing of ideas and experiences.
I’m happy to see that Writerly Life is now a “recognized blog”, and grateful for that recognition. Now it’s back to the grindstone to keep turning out articles that will help readers with their own writing projects.
How To Add a Twist To Your Ending
Many modern novels these days suffer from a curious problem. Their authors are a little embarrassed about the conventions of plot — the climax, the tidying of loose ends, the magician’s withdraw. Their solution is a little bland: too many endings just peter out sadly, assuring us that life for the character will go on as it already does, or just slightly sadder, and that the world really hasn’t been changed by what has occurred in these pages. I’ve read several contemporary novels lately that are going along just great until this tepid sort of ending, leaving me making excuses for an otherwise electrifying work. Luckily, though, this isn’t a fate all books must fall into. Here are a few tips for making sure your ending isn’t so lukewarm.
Withhold one last bit of information until the end.
Ideally, your readers should be surprised or engaged down to the very last sentence of your story. The problem is that the major climax usually doesn’t happen in the last sentence. So instead of spewing everything out a page beforehand, continue to hold a little nugget of information in reserve. Hold it close to the chest, so to speak, until the last possible moment that you can reveal. It could be something big, like the fact that someone is alive when everyone thought he was dead, or something small, like the fact that the vase was stolen. Just make it something to keep us thinking even as we’re closing the book.
After the jump: two more ways to add oomph to your endings.
