Unexpected Therapy: Need to Get Over It? Write about It!

Writing is unexpected therapy--more and more studies are finding this true.  We get healthier the more we write.  

How can that happen?  (Especially if you're stuck right now, your writing may feel far from a healing act!)

One of my students, who recently published his first novel, sent me an article in the Harvard Business Review this week.  Writing is being featured in leadership development workshops now; it's helping executives "digest" difficult experiences in their careers. 

Read more »

A Letter to Your Inner Critic: How to Stop the Invisible Sabotage to Your Creativity

This week, my beginning-level online class is facing the Inner Critic.  I think it's great timing, with the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving, to offer ourselves a little creative forgiveness by getting to know this inner voice that can so often derail us from our book writing efforts.

Everyone faces the Inner Critic, no matter how experienced they are.  Professional writers, even those who have published widely and won awards, even give it names.  Sue Grafton calls hers "the ego," the part that's always concerned with "how are we doing?"  Some Inner Critics are funny, joking with you inside your head about taking it all so seriously.  Most are discouraging, even menacing. 

But rarely is this inner voice truthful--its job is to sabotage our efforts to make art, to do our writing. 

Read more »

Reflecting Surfaces: Using the “Landscape” to Make Character Come Alive

A memoirist in one of my online classes was trying to write about the sadness she felt at her father’s unexpected death. Her feedback group gave her an unexpected response: while it was clear she was very sad, when they heard her speak of his death, her feelings on the page were abstract, hard to really grasp.

“They don’t feel any of the sadness I feel,” she told me. She cried as she wrote, so this bland response confused her.

Read more »

Character Cards--A Cool Way to Enhance Your Storyboard (and Story!)

Three elements are essential to all books, no matter the genre:  there must be conflict, there must be believable character (real or imagined), and there must be place, or atmosphere.  Characters are fun to work with.  Even if you're writing a real-life tale with people who existed in history or as your potential readers, you need to know them.  The reader depends on you to present your characters well.

Tracy Sayre, founder of Writers Work, runs writing conferences in New York City and the Catskills, among other location.  Tracy recently watched several of my youtube videos and designed a very unique W storyboard using character cards.  She said she watched the storyboarding video many times while writing her novel and came up with this version of the traditional storyboard.  The photos below show her character cards and how she places them on the storyboard as the characters enter her story.

Read more »

Structure Advice for Wordsmiths: Why Good Writing Comes After Good Structure When Developing Your Book

We all admire wordsmiths, those who can sharpen and hone words until they sing. I have the pleasure of working with many top-notch wordsmiths in my book-writing classes:  writers well-published in magazines, blogs, newspaper columns, reviews.  You'd recognize their names, you'd admire them too.

Two such wordsmiths attended my workshop last week at the Loft.  Both are working on books and have learned from editors that they need to beef up their book's structure.  

Read more »

Self-Promotion versus Creating Community--Where Is the Line for You?

Fame has always been a hot topic of discussion among writers.  An unsavory one.  A necessary one.  If we long to be published, we ask those who are published:  How did you get there?  We read the bestseller lists and wonder about the process of climbing to such recognition.  Once we have that contract, that great agent, we still must struggle to get our work received, recognized, reviewed.  It gets wearying.

Because, for many of us, all we really want to do is make art.  We want to write.  We want to sink into the worlds on our page. 

Read more »

Self-Publishing: No Longer Just the "Vanity" Option for Today's First-Time Authors

Can you really self-publish?  Or is it career suicide for a writer? 

My indie-released songwriter friends never understood why writers are so hung up about self-publishing.  Musicians have long separated from the labels and ventured out on their own, releasing their own CDs and working with indie distributors like cdbaby.

But we writers have been told for decades that unless we get an agent and go the traditional route, we'll never be taken seriously in our writing careers.

Read more »

Learning versus Performing Mode: How Each Influences Your Writing Right Now

As a writing teacher, I deal with discouragement every day.  Not about my teaching, although that can certainly arise.  I face the discouragement of my students, as they learn new skills.

Most challenging of the skill-building classes I teach is the advanced-level online book class.  Twenty writers from all over the world gather to learn the art of revision.  

Revision is truly the long-distance drive of writing a book.  You've got the draft, you're enthused (astonished!) to have actually completed it, and now you want to make it sing.  But revision skills are totally different than drafting skills.  Even if the person is a good writer, they might not be able to revise.  And it can lead to deep discouragement.

Read more »

Detail That Matters and Detail That Doesn't: Why the First Makes Your Writing Come Alive and the Second Dulls the Shine

Some people love lots of sensory detail in writing.  I'm one of them.  If a writer shows me the place, what the people wear, the smells and sounds, I'm right there with the story.

But I've learned over the years that detail only works if it's relevant to what's happening.  One of my teachers called it "salient detail."  In other words, if the character or narrator isn't experiencing shifts because of the detail, it's irrelevant to the reader.  It can even derail the story's pace and purpose, dulling its shine.

Example:  In my current novel I'm writing about a small plane pilot who deliberately crashes her plane to stage her own death.  With the help of a writing colleague who is a flight instructor, I researched the details inside the cockpit of a small plane.  I got a lot of details!  Maybe twenty.  I knew I didn't want to list all of them.  Too many details definitely drop the tension of the crash scene. 

What Details Do Inside Your Reader's Brain
Each time you add a detail, the reader has to imagine it.  (Or skip it--which many readers do!)  They literally have to go to a different place in their brain, away from the processing of words and into the processing of visual or sensual memories, for an instant, to do this imagining. 

This only takes an instant, but it's an instant for each detail!  If I used twenty different descriptive details about the interior of the Piper Cub cockpit, it would be a long, long imagining.  The reader would probably put the book down, having forgotten why we were in the cockpit in the first place.  (To crash the plane.)

So I put myself inside the character's head.  I thought about what she would see or experience that would have relevance for someone in this panicked state, about to stage her own death.  I chose three of the twenty that echoed this panic:
1.   Her breath fogging the windshield because it is very cold outside. 
2.  The yoke (steering wheel) of the plane, stained from years of flying, which she has been gripping for hours.
3.   The cramped space that causes her to have to twist a certain way to get her jacket.

It was hard to jettison all the great details I'd researched, but they really didn't pertain directly to this moment in my story.  Details must be relevant.  Otherwise, they are just detours from the purpose of your scene.

This Week's Writing Exercise
Take a scene or a chapter or even a paragraph of your writing and consider the use of sensory details:  what can be seen, touched, smelled, heard, tasted, or felt texturally (like temperature or roughness/smoothness of a surface). 

If you aren't using any details, add a few.

Look at what you've chosen and ask yourself if the details are relevant.  Here are the questions I like to use:

1.  Is the detail being directly experienced by the narrator in that moment?
2.  Does the detail have an important meaning for the narrator, opening up more of the inner story just because it's present?
3.  Is the detail tactile, sensory strong?

Try to eliminate any generic details and replace them with relevant ones.   

Getting Started Again: Writers' Tips for When You Get Stuck

I'm rerunning this post from last winter while I launch my fall semester of online classes this week.  Enjoy!

Over the years, despite thinking I was the only one, I've learned that almost everyone who writes, professional or not, faces a time-out occasionally. 

Time-outs are just the creative self needing a break.  Most are useful--they give us time for processing next steps in our writing.  We can consider whether it's going where we want it to go, we can muse over a dilemma that needs heightening or a character that needs fleshing out.  Every creative activity needs these kinds of time-outs, what some call "filling the well." 

But getting started again--that's another story.

Read more »