Category: on inspiration

When Your Struggles Become Golden

Lori Twining 10 Comments

As you get older, struggles become real and shit starts to happen to you (not just to writers, but to the entire population).

Without getting too personal—and grossing you right out—I can tell you that not every orifice in your body is made for bleeding. If it does happen (blood seeping out of a hole it’s not supposed to), that is NOT normal. Lucky for me, this started to happen to my body. You’ll see why I say lucky, instead of unlucky quite soon.

THEN:

I waited three weeks before calling the doctor’s office because seriously, I was just hoping it would stop or disappear. Silly? I know. 

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Trusting Your Vulnerability

Bernice Connell Leave a comment
Adding Emotion to your Writing

I am hesitant to include a lot of emotion in my writing. It seems too personal and leaves me feeling exposed. Maybe I don’t trust that the writing will ring true or even more worrisome, that it will be silly or cheesy. 

It’s not that I have a burning need to write something devastating or overly sentimental but the act of writing really is baring one’s soul. Most of us just want readers to find something to connect with in our shared human experience. Theoretically I understand that, if well written, the emotional experience will belong to the characters.

Just go deeper.

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Surprise!  How to write a plot twister (and I’m not talking about the weather)

Seana Moorhead Leave a comment

I like a good surprised twist in a book. I love it when a book puts in a major twist that is both believable but that I did not see coming. It’s a tricky balance to manage well. Usually I can spot a plot twister before the wind even gets brisk; mostly because they are set out as if they are slowly spewing volcano.

The smoke is obvious, the billowing soot a give way, so I am not surprised when the volcano “suddenly” spits out the “surprise”.

I am looking for the kind of twist that makes a reader exclaim out loud while reading.  A moment that compels a reader to tell the stranger sitting next to them, “do you know what just happened!”  It’s the whoa – everyone is a ghost – kind of surprise.

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“Why Do You Want to Write?”

Bernice Connell 1 Comment

This was the question from my long-time, creative friend Joyce, when I shared with her my doubts about trying to write.

A fearless artist when it comes to her passions, she immediately told me, “First of all, you don’t try, you just do.”

We often go many months without being in touch but have recently set up every-other-week check-ins, maintaining a friendship that thrives on three hour phone chats.

She declared it was time for me to get back to the ‘why?’ Read more

Winter is for Writing

Seana Moorhead Leave a comment

February’s weather has been like a stew pot–snow flurries, ice pellets, freezing rain, more snow, bitter winds–and rarely a glimpse of the sun as if it’s the bay leaf in the meal.  The days still feel too short with the grey skies and whiteout blizzards and the nights are long and chill the bones. Snow days cancel plans and keep us home. Forget snow shoveling and chipping away the ice built up on your step.  It’s a perfect time for writing.

 

 

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Now Is The Winter of Our Discontent…or is it?

Andrée Levie-Warrilow Leave a comment

Winter is not my favourite season… and it’s not because of the outrageous heating bills, the terror of driving in whiteouts, the dodging black ice in the grocery store parking lot,  the shortened hours of daylight, the cancelled music concerts,  or the wind that blew most of the songbirds south.

It’s because I need colour.

I am a devout gardener; my front and back yards are riots of colours for three seasons. Spring and summer and fall each have their own colour-filled delights and they never last long enough. And I’m a visual artist. I sell paintings filled with a range of  colours that convey every mood and emotion you can put on canvas. Every room in my house is painted a different colour.

And yet where do I live? In a Snow Belt.  Read more

Have you Fed your Writing Muse Today?

Donna Judy Curtin 1 Comment

What is it about this writing thing that we enjoy?

Why would anyone want to rise before the sun, to plunk away on a keyboard in the dark and put their precious words and feelings up for the judgement of others?

Is it all about the imagining of a character’s challenges and how they can overcome them in a heroic way? Or perhaps this writing thing is a way to come to terms with our lives or to imagine how the story could have ended differently.

 

When I consider the moments and life experiences that have inspired my best stories, I clearly see the muse for my writing.

Do you know yours?

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