When you’re on fire, writing is an exciting whirlwind made in equal parts of unicorns, spaceships, kittens, fireworks, and awesome.
But like anything else, that doesn’t last. And once the flash-blind heady rush flows away, you’re left with a fantastic first draft that really needs work.
Continue reading “The Weekend Redirect: Balancing Life and Writing: When It Isn’t Exciting”
There are many rules about writing prose fiction. Any creative writing course will drill those rules into you. But don’t be fooled. These “rules” are merely guidelines that help you focus your prose. But they aren’t commandments. I think there is only one real rule so far as prose construction goes:
Rules about writing should be followed, unless they shouldn’t.
Continue reading “The Worst Good Writing Advice I’ve Received So Far”
The consistently excellent J.C. Cauthon (J.C.’s for life, yo!) writes about my own Achilles heal: getting into the rhythm of writing.
Specifically, she writes about trying to find the groove of writing again. You know how it is: thousands of ideas, mere minutes of free time. Life intervenes. A move half-way across the country is intervening in mine. But once you start down the dark side of not writing, forever will it…
Damn, I am SUCH a nerd.
Continue reading “Word Count: Struggling to Find My Rhythm Again”
This week, we visit P.L. Thomas’ excellent site “The Becoming Radical.”
In this post, Thomas discusses the need for poetry in education, and how poetry and fiction seem to be falling by the wayside in favor of testing scores needed to justify school funding.
The testing requirements alone are evil, but the cutting out of poetry from the curriculum is a travesty. Poetry is an essential to education as well as life. But I’ll shut up about it because Thomas puts it far better than I can.
In Defense of Poetry: “Oh My Heart”
“No, no. You’ve got something the test and machines will never be able to measure: you’re artistic. That’s one of the tragedies of our times, that no machine has ever been built that can recognize that quality, appreciate it, foster it, sympathize with it.”
Paul Proteus to his wife Anita in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano
“So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens” is, essentially, a grammatical sentence in the English language. While the syntax is somewhat out of the norm, the diction is accessible to small children—the hardest word likely being “depends.” But “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams is much more than a sentence; it is a poem:
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens.
A relatively simple English language sentence shaped into purposeful lines and stanzas becomes poetry. And like…
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In the latest post on LionAroundWriting, the subject of “writer’s freeze” is addressed.
Specifically, this refers to a total writer shutdown when panicking about word counts and trying to keep your subject as brief as possible without cutting everything interesting out of a story.
This is more than a post; this is a conversation. So please join in the talk!
…ANYONE ELSE GET THIS? Maybe this terror of going over a word limit began at university with 2000 word limits on essays. I get the freeze when I’m writing a short story. Maybe freeze isn’t a great word for it but I’ll explain. Sometimes I will be writing a piece and I’m so conscious of word count that I end up writing lazy sentences, freezing up; instead of describing the world and filling in those all important details that bring a story to life, I’ll write stubby sentences, providing a skeleton but little else as a result of being way too mindful of the number of words. It’s some form of mental block.
And if I plan to write for a WordPress post, I’m always trying to keep it snappy, under about 5-600 words, and the freeze begins again. I’m so habituated to strive for 500 words online…
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The BIGGEST minutiae 