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100 Words at a Time: Getting That New Project Started
By Christine Hennebury. Half the battle with writing is getting started. The blank page seems enormous. Your brain flashes a million ideas past you…or it goes blank. Every idea you do manage to hold on to seems trite or overdone. It’s not a fun feeling. Yet, you know you *want* to write. You would love to have a story or essay or novel written. What you need is something to grab onto, a handhold, a way to pull yourself forward just a little bit. You need 100 words.* Sure, 100 words is not a full story (unless you are writing a drabble!), it’s not even enough to describe an elaborate…
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Writerly Warm-Ups – 5 fun ways to prepare to write your story
by Christine Hennebury Are you a SERIOUS writer? Are you maybe even a bit TOO serious? Writing well requires discipline. We all know that, and we all try to practice that. Well, more like, we are all hard on ourselves for not practicing that enough. I feel like our desire to be dedicated writers who are doing things right gets in the way of our goals sometimes. I’d like to help you sidestep that instinct for a little while so you can remember what you like about writing. After all, it’s a lot easier to keep coming back to a task you basically enjoy…
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Celebrate Writing: An Inventory of the Good Stuff
by Christine Hennebury A lot of my columns here on 10MN have been about ways you can tweak or improve your writing experience to make it a little easier on yourself. Today, I would like you to take a moment to celebrate the things that are already good about your writing experiences. You might even want to grab a notebook so you can make a chart or a list or a drawing so you can come back to it when you feel a bit cranky about your writing. Let’s start in a really general way. 1) What draws you to write? Many writers talk about a compulsion to…
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Six Tricky Things You May Have To Do In Order To Achieve Your Goals In 2018
This is the time of year when all of us, or at least us self-involved, sensitive writing types, think about how we can make this upcoming year the best ever. This is an exciting time of year and it’s also kind of scary. We can’t be the writer we want to be if we keep doing the things we’ve always done. We’re going to have to make some changes. Sigh. 1. You may have to say no to the expectations of others. Why is this tricky? For better or worse you have invested in relationships. Some of these people around you may not fully understand your need to write.…
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Never Give Up (Or Why New Writers Feel A Little Nuts)
It’s FALL here in beautiful New England! The trees are showing off their magnificent colors. October is magical. It’s breathtaking and awe-inspiring. It’s glorious and crisp. October is the best time of year. Unless you’re an acorn. I am not an acorn, but I would imagine that if I were, and if I were sentient and anthropomorphic, it would be very difficult for me not to feel sorry for myself in October. Where would acorns like me go? If not eaten by a squirrel, then I and my friends could be buried in a hole somewhere, forgotten under the brutal snow that New England’s prize for loving autumn too much. Poor…
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Top Eight Things Future Best-Selling Authors Are Doing Right Now
Someday in the future, maybe five years, maybe ten years, maybe twenty years from now, the best-seller lists will name authors that no one has heard of now. Those future best-selling authors don’t spring up out of nowhere, they’re alive and breathing as we speak. They’re out there, right now, getting kids ready for school, driving to the day job or composing another blog post. Future best-sellers also working on their craft. They’re hard at work, making the most of the time they have to create the art that someday will be acknowledged by the world. What exactly are they doing then? They probably write every day. If they…
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Prompts Are Everywhere: Using Writing Prompts to Spark Creativity
Have you ever needed that spark to write? Try writing prompts. A blank page glares back at you, taunting you to write something. Anything. A minute passes. Then another. Three cups of coffee later, you find yourself on social media watching cats riding Roombas and the page remains woefully blank. Ideas are everywhere, but sometimes we need a kick in the brain to notice them. Writing prompts provide something the bottom of your caffeinated beverage cannot: a fresh idea. Prompts can help you out of a rut and trigger new creativity. Let’s say you been “adulting” all day and your brain is full of kids, bills, and work. Maybe your muse…
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10 Ways To Be A Happy Writer
By Michele Matthews Can you be a happy writer? You’ve come home from a tiring day job. You try to sit down at your laptop and write a few words before relaxing for the evening. But the words won’t flow. Or maybe you’re one of those lucky people who get to write full-time for a living. You sit in your home office day after day pounding out the words. Are you a happy writer? Is it possible to be one? Here are ten ways to be a happy writer. Take breaks Whether you’re writing an hour or writing full-time, you need to take a short break of 10-15 minutes each…
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Filling Up That Uninspired Empty Feeling
Feeling empty as an artist? When people say that you need to fill up, they are tapping into a well-loved metaphor about the artist. The artist, we’re going to assume, has a lot to say. They have emotions and connections, stories and accounts, worldviews and interpretations, images and sentences. An artist pours out their art for the benefit of the hearer, the viewer, and the reader. But in order for them to pour themselves out, they must have something in their heart, mind, and souls first. They need to be filled up before they can empty themselves out into their art. Where do they get their inspiration? Currently, I’m…
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Five Reasons Why I Would Write Series Fiction (And One Reason I Wouldn’t)
What to read? I’m at the library, looking for something to check out and I see a row of similar-looking spines, books all by the same author, some with numbers on them. It’s a little army of series fiction! (And almost always one of those numbers is missing!) I have an irrational insecurity around serial fiction as a reader. I feel like I have to start at book one if I’m going to start at all, and then, I wonder, will I feel compelled to read all the books in the series? What will I miss out on in the literary world if I get to the end of Adam…
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What To Do When Darkness Keeps You From Writing
I have a section in my book called Facing The Darkness. Most writers I know have a resistance. This is usually an antagonistic force that they need to deal with before they put words on paper. This darkness has been misunderstood — at least by my readers — in that some think that it’s about the thriller or horror genre (nope) or that it’s an excuse not to write. This darkness is deeper than a lack of motivation or lack of creativity. The darkness I’m referring to are the penetrating lies that are keeping you from pursuing your dreams. If you don’t have darkness, then consider yourself blessed. Julia Cameron,…
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How Champion Free Writers Combat The Blank Page
Facing the blank screen can be one of the most intimidating moments of being a writer. I have a sure fire way to conquer this moment: the free write. A free write is a word spew, or word vomit if you don’t mind a graphic image. A free write is also a brainstorm or stream of consciousness. It is the act of putting down a word — any word — and then another, another, and another. In a free write, you conquer the blank page by the simple act of just making it not blank. That effort can make a difference in your confidence and your momentum for the rest of your writing…
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What’s So Bad About the Advice, “Write What You Know”?
What’s so problematic about “write what you know?” I swear, sometimes in writing circles, these are fighting words. Mark Twain famously gave this advice. And in the context of who he was (um, very famous for his fictionalized accounts of his boyhood on the Mississippi River) and the time period in which he lived (yeah, so authors in the late 19th century were just dipping their literary toe into fantasy) this made a lot of sense. He also had his own sales figures to contend with: his books Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were commercially successful. His more fantastic stories, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and…
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7 Ways To Keep Your Buzz & Write Drunk — By Elaine Bayless
“Write drunk. Edit sober.” Easy enough, right? It means to write without boundaries, loose and wild and out of control. Thoughtful word selection and complex grammatical decisions belong in the world of editing. And yet, how often do you “lose your buzz” and start editing right in the middle of writing? How do you write drunk? During Nanowrimo each year I see dozens of people falling into the editing trap when they should be writing. I get it: I’ve been trapped by those some concerns too. But nothing kills the possibility of finishing your work faster than accidentally falling into editing mode. Here’s 7 ways to keep your buzz…
