Tag: Writer’s group

Getting Past Your Own Preconceptions

Andrée Levie-Warrilow 2 Comments
Two Roads
Divergent Creativity

So I’m working with some of my writing colleagues on an anthology of short stories.

We agreed on a common theme to give the stories context and cohesion, and the ideas were brilliant and coming fast and furious. As anyone who belongs to one knows, the best thing about being in a writers’ group is it inspires you to hunker down to your own work. As soon as they come up with ideas out loud, you find yourself spurred to create and contribute your own. So many ideas – it whets the appetite of the imagination.

I made an outline; I made notes. Copious notes. Dialogues. I could see the characters in my head, I could imagine where they lived, the routes they moved along on. The words came, the pages filled up. Read more

Have the Stones to do it!

Donna Judy Curtin Leave a comment

(Making time to write when you think your life is too busy!)

If you are going to write, if you are going to call yourself a writer, then write, finish something and put it out there. At a leadership conference I attended recently, part of the training was focused upon scheduling your time. Believe it or not, it wasn’t all about the proper way of saying something or modeling something; a huge chunk of time was spent teaching us how imperative it is to schedule the important stuff.

The gist was – in your life there are the big rocks, the stones, the things you want and must do to achieve success in whatever you do. The time for these things, like writing, is competing with everything else in your life… and let’s face it, if you want to be successful a writer, you need to write. You need to write, and often, until you are so good at it, that someone says, “Man, we gotta publish that!” The other stuff, like watching less than averagely good looking guys wrestle alligators on television, randomly surfing the internet or creeping facebook… is the stuff that will not help your writing career – that stuff is the pebbles, the sand, the dirt. If you fill your jar with pebbles and dirt first – then there is no room for the stones.

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