Step 1: Forget that you agreed to submit one in the first place.
Step 2: Remember as you fall into bed that the nagging feeling you have forgotten something was in fact accurate.
Step 3: Grab a pad of paper and begin making marks on the page and hope that something of relevance to writing will appear.
Step 4: Recall all the other times in your life you have forgotten a looming deadline.
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A friend recently leant me a book called “The Lost Words”. This book lists twenty words relating to the natural world that were taken out of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD)—a reference book aimed at young children and contains about 10,000 words. The book, beautifully illustrated by Jackie Morris and written by Robert Macfarlace, highlights twenty of the removed words, all connected to nature.
Obviously, when deciding upon what 10,000 words to use in a dictionary, choices have to be made. What would you pick? What would you leave out? Dictionaries have been doing this for years, adding in new words or new spellings, often to outraged critics. The editors of OJD decided to drop certain words relating to nature and added in new “modern” words. For example, “acorn”, “buttercup” and “starling” were all dropped. The words added were “blog” (ah, the irony in writing a blog about this) and “voice-mail” and “chatroom”.
Read moreI’ve been doing a complete re-write of my novel. I’m not quite at the climax, but I can see it from here. I’ve been working with my novel for a long time, so I thought I knew my characters. But in the re-writes, they’ve become a little unfamiliar. And because I don’t know them well, they’re feeling a little flat.
In my doggedness to reach the end of my novel, I lose my sense of play and creativity. One of my wrong ideas is that I don’t need writing exercises, that I don’t need to generate new ideas.
Of course I couldn’t be more wrong. New ideas are exactly what I need to bring my characters to life.
I was working at my day job and looking for a new podcast to listen to. I found: Inside Creative Writing, by Brad Reed. In Episode 3, Sparking your Creativity, Brad gives us two different idea generators to use on a character, place, or plot. The one I tried went like this:
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For a fiction writer, I’ve been spending an awful lot of time lately reading biographies.
First it was Sally Field’s autobiography In Pieces. Now I’m almost finished reading Julie Andrews’ second book in her autobiographical trilogy, called Home Work. Next in my reading pile is a brand new biography of Janis Joplin, called simply, Janis.
I’m not sure why I’m on this little non-fic reading kick. I like to read a biography or two a year, but three in a row? Not typically. Nevertheless, as a writer who enjoys focusing on character development, reading biographies and memoirs provides a tremendous resource for learning about other people’s lives straight from the horse’s mouth. They’re also invaluable for researching a character you might write in the future.
As a writer, I spend a lot of time … not writing. If you don’t believe me, just ask our blog wrangler, the inimitable Lori Twining, she’s always trying to get me to write my blog post. The funny thing is that blog writing is half of what I do for a living. Ha ha …
… oh, Lori doesn’t think that’s as funny as I do …
But I have a life. I have a lot of things going on in that life. The website I work for locally was recently hacked and it’s one of my jobs to see that that doesn’t happen again.
How am I supposed to write while the bad people are trying to use our site to get sensitive info from our readers.
My boss asked me recently, “Why don’t you write for our site any more?”
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Damn! The need for radiation therapy was unexpected news for me a few months ago. Treatments were scheduled five days a week for a total of thirty five, in London. It took me a couple of weeks to resolve that it really was the only option in my fight against thyroid cancer.
I decided to drive daily as long as I felt well, anticipating the September and October weather to be perfect. This venture was a means to an end and I would make the most of traveling through pretty, rural Grey County via Grey Road 3.
The drives that were anticipated to be, at the very least, inconvenient, quickly became a comfort – as I was safely ensconced in my trusty Jetta with a world of beauty surrounding me. Turning south on Road 3 every day always brought energy and optimism and this increasingly familiar, quiet country road guided me home again every night.
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A writer’s life is full of many solo hours of rolling around in doubt, heartache, heartbreak… and a few happy aha! moments, that ultimately make us smile and laugh as if we have been riding a standup rollercoaster for three hours straight, jumped off, puked and then screamed, “Let’s do that again!”
Thanksgiving is the perfect time to be reminded of just how thankful I am for being a writer with an active imagination, an anxious heart and a not-so-strong stomach. This kind of up and down rollercoaster feeling happens to me often. Daily, in fact. But without the puking. Mainly this happens because I struggle with the whole concept of “Do I know what I’m doing?” to “Of course, I know what I’m doing, I just sit down and write what I’m thinking, right?” Yeah, that doesn’t always work out as easily as it sounds.
Today is Thanksgiving, so as a writer I am thankful for many things…
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As the newest member of Ascribe Writers it is my turn (I was coerced) to write about writing. Apparently, I am allowed to focus on anything as long as my musings revolve around the fact that I am a writer.
Well, if that’s true, why is all my written work locked up in legal files that were presented to the courts, insurance companies or employers? Oh right, that’s part of my day job. You know that job… it’s the one we all do so we can do the things we really want to do in our ‘spare time’.
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