Tweet This week, my dearest inklings, I find myself seventy-four pages into Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and enjoying it beyond words. But since the point of this article is to share with you–in words, no less–what I am learning from what I am reading, I give you here my attempt to […]
We writers are people with ideas…except when we’re not. The initial sit-down-and-start-scribbling-like-mad ideas are not a problem. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve got that covered. But what happens after the first bout of hectic, joyous franticness fizzles out?
Last week, Aaron posted an article on writing and procrastination and the benefits of not procrastinating on your writing. On Monday, he followed up with a writing exercise designed to help us writers write without procrastination. In keeping with that theme, I am going to share with you my story of How I Beat The System And Gave Myself A Migraine. I shall also attempt to refrain from starting every sentence with an adverbial phrase.
Tweet Her mouth opens wide in a huge smile that draws every eye in the room. His nervous habit: narrating for everyone in the room what’s happening on the TV screen. When she feels melancholy, she hums “Amazing Grace” and Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.” When she feels happy, she hums ’80s rock ballads. His right […]
That’s right. You heard me. Laundry. Did you know laundry has lessons to teach about writing? I didn’t–until a particular inconvenience of apartment life thrust my preconceived laundry notions into tumble-dry-high. You like that apropos imagery? Yea verily, I thought so.
You’ve heard it before, in any writing class you’ve ever taken. You’ve heard it from Nathan Bransford and Writer’s Digest and from me. You know it, you’ve always known it, but you’ve never really been able to follow through. Still, the fact remains: if you want to get better at writing, you need to practice writing every day.
Over the past two-and-a-half weeks, I have written five posts (counting this one) for UnstressedSyllables. What I’ve been writing for this blog is not fiction.
But.
Since I joined Unstressed Syllables, I have added 6,000 words to my work-in-progress, a paranormal novel entitled SHADOWS AFTER MIDNIGHT. That’s compared to the preceding six weeks of teeth-pull-writing that garnered me a measly 7,000 words. Now, I find myself putting together story scenes in my head when I’m away from my computer.
Tweet Once upon a time, I started reading the epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time (WoT) by Robert Jordan. Sadly, Mr. Jordan passed away before he could complete the series; however, author Brandon Sanderson is in the process of carrying on Jordan’s work. I have yet to read anything Sanderson has written for WoT, […]
Right now, I’m approximately ninety pages from finishing Koontz’s ODD HOURS, the fourth novel in a series spun around a psychic young man appropriately named Odd Thomas. Describing Odd as a character would be yet another blog post in its own right; suffice it for now to say that I find him fascinating, amusing, heart-warming, endearing, and many other positive words suffixed with -ing. What I’m currently interested in, and WILAWritWe from Mr. Koontz’s novel is something to which I myself am not adhering as I write what you are reading now, and that something is this: Simplicity.
