Advertise here via BSA

It is sometimes easy to forget the power that words can have.

We deal with them day in and day out, they are our bricks and mortar, the things which we use and manipulate for work or for pleasure. Some of us use them to create new worlds, fictional places where new characters breath life. Some of us use our words to persuade, to sell, to convince people of the merits of a new product or service. Sometimes we use our words to change the opinions of others, or to defend our own.

A recent entry from the wonderful Letters of Note reminded me of the power that our words can have. Specifically, the power to give hope, and to remind someone that all is not lost, even when things look bleak.

The post contains a letter written by the author E.B. White, in response to a letter from a fan that questioned White on the dark future of the human race as he saw it. White’s response is short and simple, but his few well-chosen words contain a power in them that goes far beyond a couple of words on a page.

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

I wanted to share this letter with you (you can read the full thing over at Letters of Note – please do!) as a reminder that the words we use every day contain a power, and the things we can do with them can be incredible. As writers we are skilled in their use, and should act accordingly.

Use your words for good. Whatever that might be.

————————————————————————————————————————

Do you use your words for good? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image courtesy of theroamincatholic.

Advertise here via BSA

Writing prompts can be found all over the Internet, from single words to pictures to scenarios. Hey, a writing prompt doesn’t even have to be a “Writing Prompt” to be a writing prompt – anything can be used to kick off a piece of writing. But it’s nice when some thought has been put into something which is meant to kick start someone’s imagination.

This weekend I came across a new feature on the sci-fi/fantasy/science/tech/geek site io9 – Concept Art Writing Prompts. What I really like about it is that the pictures will most likely be weird and wonderful – a step up perhaps from a lot of ordinary and mundane prompts you might come across.

This is the first – a fantastically bizarre and playful image titled “Autopsy Lake”, by illustrator John Hendrix. It’s so wonderfully over-the-top that I’m sure it won’t fail to spure you into a story, even if it’s just a quick piece of flash fiction.

I think this will become a great resource for writing prompts, although at one a week it will grow slowly. It will be perfect though for the writer wishing to write a story a week perhaps, follow along and take your cue from io9 each week. The site always shows amazing and interesting artwork, so I am sure this feature will be no exception.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

What do you think of this feature? Do you know any other sites with similarly interesting and unique writing prompts? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below!

Image courtesy of io9.

Advertise here via BSA

New Year’s Resolutions are the fine porcelain vessels in which we plan to keep our better selves: they look great but are tricky to handle and broken all too easily. Yet year on year people make them, fully prepared to watch them shatter all too quickly. Now is the time of year when we fly in the face of reality to make bold, beautiful ideas, yet somehow that burning idealism in which they’re fired soon dies away. The passion cools, and by the middle of the year we’re so busy looking back that we forget we were looking forward.

We make New Year’s Resolutions as a coping mechanism – a way to make sense of the vast amount of new space suddenly ahead of us; a way to give ourselves some small illusion of control and perspective over the coming year. Because imagine what you, especially you as a writer, could do in 12 months. All that potential. A vast blank space to fill with your creativity. A whole year….just think of the stories you could tell in that time. Surely it would be criminal to waste such a generous gift?

Make a Promise

Perhaps the inherent problem with resolutions is that promises made to oneself are decidedly hard to keep. Therefore, our idea on Fuel Your Writing was to offer up the comments section of this article as a pulpit, if you will, for you to publicly declare your own writing resolutions for the coming year. Make that promise, here, in front of your fellow writers. Seeing your resolution written out and shared in such a public place will help to solidify it in your mind, to make the promise real, concrete, and doable.

Mine?

Okay, okay, if I’m asking you to share your resolutions, it’s only fair that I do the same. So, this is me, making a public promise to write some fiction! I love writing short stories, but while I do plenty of writing every day, it is a long, long time since I last wrote any fiction. But, that will change this year!

So, that’s mine, what’s yours!?

Please share your writing resolutions in the comments section below!

Image courtesy of Flood Gondekow

Advertise here via BSA

First off, a huge congratulations for any of you who completed NaNoWriMo this year! Today on Fuel Your Writing, Jenn & JD look back over the month, and discover that there is more to take from it than just a 50,000 word story.

——————————————————————————————————————————–

The Month is Over but the Ink Goes On

I would like to thank all the people who supported JD and me through this wild month of writing and creativity; my husband, our close family and friends, other NaNo Writers, and of course, my cat, who never lets me write alone.

This was a wild month for both JD and me, and I will let JD tell his story in his own words, if he has any left. As for my experience, even after all of these years it really does not get any easier. If anything, this year was one of the more difficult. November turned out to be a very busy month for our household. Between writing and belly dance class and two major performance events in one month, weekends and evenings were very difficult to squeeze writing time. I did not think I would make it this year.

The Things That Push You

What pushed me to the finish line? This year was more important than ever. If I had written these articles throughout the experience and failed, what sort of example did I set for the Fuel Your Writing readers? If, in the writing classes I lead, my students made it and I fell short, what place do I have at the head of that table? And, most important, as a parent it is an obligation to set an example of hard work, and dedication to a goal, for JD I had to make it, no matter what! In other words, other people got me through.

Pressure Can Lead To Amazing Things

I really do want to give extra special props to my best friend in Central New York, Jenn. This was her second NaNoWriMo and for a while there it looked pretty bad. On the 29th of November she was at less than half. Somehow, the NaNoGods only know, she finished! Toward the end, she was writing over 3,000 words an hour! Kudos, bella!

What Now? – Wait for NaNoEdMo!

So, now what? What will you do with your NaNo Novel now that the deed is done? CreateSpace has that epic offer to see your work in print, which is a real treat, and a great way to see if you are ready for the next step as a writer. It is not just about writing the story, the hard work comes after the words are on the page.

For now, print out your NaNo Novel – finished or not, print and frame that winner certificate, set that masterpiece aside and let it settle for a time. March marks NaNoEdMo, and I will be right there with you if you decide to make that manuscript bleed. If this was just a test of your writing skill and now you hope it will never see the light of day, maybe a different challenge is for you; Script Frenzy is in April, and JD and I are both itching to get onto that business too!

See you soon NaNo Heros and Fuel Your Writing Followers! It was a great month!

JD’s Story Continues

Yes it is my story. Hello magnificent writers! Nanowrimo ended but does that mean you’re finished? Not the slightest. I agree with my mom, the best bet is packing it away and forgetting about it, perhaps until March and NaNoEdMo. You could even use it as the basis of your Script Frenzy script! Whatever you do make the most of it and live the writers dream!

You may think “my story isn’t good enough for the public, I need this, not that.” But take a look at a picture of yourself, what is the first things you notice? Most likely, it’s the bad stuff, because you know the ways you want to make it better. Others don’t know. Like a dance, if no one knows the dance, no one knows you messed up. So if no one knows what you really wanted then you have to go with the flow. You may edit the story in March, or sooner, whenever you feel the necessary time comes. No matter what comes and no matter what happens, your story matters.

——————————————————————————————————————————–

Thank you very much to Jenn and JD for sharing their NaNoWriMo experience with us this year! We hope everyone who took part had an awesome month, please let us know how it went in the comments!

Images courtesy of NaNoWriMo and

Advertise here via BSA

With just two days to go in NaNoWriMo 2011, JD and Jenn share their thoughts on the experience, before getting their heads down for the finish line.

—————————————————————————————————————————

JD Sees the Finish Line on the Horizon

Hello there! It is the final stretch and we will soon reach the finish. So start finalizing your stories and make haste if you’re a bit behind! For now never give up on yourself because if you do you’re just going to be outpaced in the race. Keep your fingers moving for the final days of the NaNoWriMo competition!

I have been wondering how I should end or if the beginning is too sweet and simple so this has been a very long stretch of confusion and fright among what my story will be like to others. As this is my first year of NaNoWriMo I’m hoping nothing will go wrong, but something may anyway. But you just have to go with it. My computer could explode for all I know so have a great time and don’t lose sight of your goal!

Jenn Sees a New Day Rising

As JD wrote, here we are, in the home stretch. I hope your month overflowed with creative moments and bursts of literary inspiration! I really did not feel that this was my year until the very end. Every sentence was like pulling teeth, every day was drudgery. My inner editor haunted every paragraph and I am pretty sure I still don’t have anything legitimately resembling a plot.

Towards the end, things are finally beginning to fall into place and I may actually make it to the finish line. This year wasn’t really about the novel writing though, now that I think on it. This was about sharing the adventure with JD. It is about his story, about the kid that told his friends every November that his mom is writing this month so “keep quiet” or “let’s play somewhere other than my house”. That kid, this year, told his friends that he is the one writing the novel.

Your Story

Again, I really hope your November was so much better than mine was. As we roll into the finish line, if you hit 50K or not, what it’s really about is your story, not just the one you are putting on paper/screen, but the one you lived this wild month. Congratulations NaNo heroes!

—————————————————————————————————————————

Have you made it to your goal yet, or are you panicking now? Good luck for all those writers scribbling furiously over the next two days!

Image courtesy of NaNoWriMo.

Advertise here via BSA

The Old Tortoise is Slowing Down

Here we are in the final stretch! I hope everyone is doing much better than I am. With Thanksgiving this Thursday and busy weekends, I will have to do some mad dashes to make it to the finish line. Fortunately, I am not a fan of Black Friday, so I will be using the day to type ‘til I drop. A few years back I tried for 100K in the month of November, I hope to call upon that energy now.

Writing Around Life

There have been good days and bad, and there have been distractions. A lot of you will be familiar with “life” getting in the way of your writing. In the past couple years I have had access to a friend’s cabin in Northern Arizona, which would have been nice to get away from distractions, but it did not work out this year. So, how is your story treating you? Where have you found a haven to hide? Or, are you in a mad dash trying to find time and inspiration between work, school, and family obligations?

I want to thank my writing students for displaying amazing skill and dedication through this adventure; all of them inspire me; helping them to succeed means as much to me as getting to the finish line myself. Write on until the end my friends!
Now please excuse me, I have some serious writing to do! Yikes!

The Hare Charges on!

We are in the final week of writing and time is scrambling around. “What should we do next, does this seem right?” these questions come up more frequently as you want it to be better than your writer buddies. We could be on third base hoping for the batter not to fail to make it to home but don’t really know what could actually happen.

You may find that your characters are either talking more in code or just not talking very much at all. But all you can do now is keep your head straight and get your writing in gear for the final week remaining. Have fun and don’t lose sight of your goal!

—————————————————————————————————————————

So, as you enter the last week of NaNoWriMo, how are you feeling? Please share with us how your progress is going in the comments section below!

Image courtesy of NaNoWriMo.org.

Advertise here via BSA

So, we’ve reached the midway point of November, which means the midway point of NaNoWriMo! This week, Jenn and her son JD discuss the benefits of getting out and meeting other writers, instead of locking yourself away to write.

————————————————————————————————————————————-

Connecting with Writers

Jenn

JD and I are keeping fair pace with our word count. We decided to reward our achievements with an outing. We visited the Glendale Public Library for a write-in lead by Pheonix ML (Municipal Liaison – volunteers who organize NaNo groups in their hometowns) Angela. Angela has lots of games and prizes for the troops! JD and I each won a pack of candy for most words in ten minutes. She introduced us to another word count game where we drew popsicle sticks to decide how many words to write in fifteen minutes. JD will tell you how he did on that one too. I am pretty sure the words I wrote in the word-sprint exercises will need heavy editing, but it was a blast.

I intend to implement the popsicle sticks at the next writing group in my studio. It was a nice change of pace to be among writers other than those I am familiar with and I really think JD needed to see how other NaNoWriMo participants were handling the challenge. It may have been a bit awkward considering all of the write-in attendees were female and college-age and up! I hope to make it to at least one more write-in before the month is out so JD has another chance to see a more varied demographic. I had a blast with the ladies though, thank you! It was interesting to hear all the different story ideas.

I really want to use this article to thank all of the MLs out there in NaNoLand too. Angela is a great example. She was welcoming, prepared, enthusiastic and imaginative. I hope all areas have MLs the live up to the standard Angela set. Thank you for the awesome NaNoWriMo stickers, the creative prizes and treating all the writers, of all ages and levels with respect. Thank you Angela and all MLs!

Discovering Write-Ins

JD

Hello all and many! I’ve discovered my first write-in at a library front consisting of six people involved and a splendid time it was! There were two sorts of “games” that involved speed-writing, which were fantastic considering I won both by hand and I have no access to a laptop! The first part was how many words you could write in ten minutes which I scored 213. The second game was you pick a stick of difficulty, green was easy, yellow was mid range, so forth; I picked green, a target of 375 words in fifteen minutes – I wrote 393!

Libraries are great places to pour out emotion into your writing, to sit with the books all around staring at you and to feel around in the silence for the words. It was a great time and I would recommend it for anyone who is struggling to get through you writing.

————————————————————————————————————————

How are you all getting on with your NaNoWriMo novels this year? Please let us know what you are writing, and how you’re getting on, in the comments below!

Image courtesy of NaNoWriMo.org.

Advertise here via BSA

As we enter the second week of November, writers across the world are deep into their NaNoWriMo novels. Jenn Czep and her son, JD, whose progress we are following, share with us their experiences so far.

————————————————————————————————————————————-

JD Discovers His Inner Editor

As of late, I have been thinking to myself “should I have so much dialogue?” or “what will happen if this does or doesn’t happen?” and things of that sort. I have been asking around if this sentence is good or not and a realization got humble-jumbled in my head saying it’s always good if you think it’s good – the same thing with art.

Writing is the figurative or factual art of learning and imagination. Can an elephant be pink and go on an adventure with a green rhinoceros? Of course it can – if you think of some wacky way to make that work!

Have fun for the next three weeks of total insanity!

Jenn Tries to Turn Hers Off

While JD is just discovering his inner editor, I am finding that in my first week of NaNoWriMo, mine will not turn off.

Ten years ago, NaNoWriMo was an adventure like nothing I had attempted before. I was so busy having fun with the challenge, editing was furthest from my mind. But this past week, after years of rewriting pieces for public consumption, that editor voice just will not shut up.

Staring at that first sentence, and deleting it a half a dozen times, I finally realized, this part of the writing process is supposed to be about breaking new ground, not building the perfect empire.

Music has been my answer, I’ve cranked up the classical and am now just riding the emotions through each scene.

Experienced writers are just as susceptible as new ones to the fear of rejection. Veterans may even have a more difficult time reclaiming the innocence of that first romance with words. Work hard this month, enjoy the honeymoon and come back and work out the deeper issues in March. To every level, NaNoWriMo is about acceptance, camaraderie of adventure, the thrill of chasing plot bunnies; tell that inner editor to take a month off.

————————————————————————————————————————

How are you all getting on with your NaNoWriMo novels this year? Please let us know what you are writing, and how you’re getting on, in the comments below!

Image courtesy of NaNoWriMo.org.

Advertise here via BSA

This isn’t so much a ‘how to write a picture book’ guide as it is something to encourage you to think about possibly writing a picture book, and some things to think about if you do. Because, no matter what age you are, picture books are cool. I studied them for a semester at university, ploughing through dusty and portentous academic tomes on the picture book in relation to all sorts of boring stuff like Postmodernism and Postcolonialism, and even Freud’s Theory of the Uncanny (God only knows what that man would have made of The Very Hungry Caterpillar), and it still didn’t dilute my love of picture books. Picture books are cool.

Even Google think picture books are cool...

Emotional Attachment

Cool, not just because they’re the first reading material you encounter, shaping the very start of your lifelong relationship with words, but also because of the emotional attachment they have; like your parents reading you a bedtime story as you gazed from under the covers at the pictures. The memories of early childhood are bound inside the covers of picture books.

Creating a picture book is to not only write for children, but also to your inner child, satisfying a need to entertain. To create a picture book is to revert to child-like acts of creation; of sitting at the kitchen table scribbling pictures and adding labels to them like ‘our day at the zoo’ with titles and arrows pointing out granddad and that funny monkey that stole his glasses. Above all though, creating a picture book is damn good fun.

Picture Book or Picturebook?

If you do plan on making one I should mention that there is a niggling and entirely academic difference between a ‘picture book’ and a ‘picturebook’, and it’s all to do with layout. A ‘picture book’ is a book that features words and pictures placed separately on the page. Think Thomas the Tank Engine or Babar. In a ‘picturebook’ everything becomes more fluid, as the text interacts with the pictures; changes font, position, size, etc depending on what the characters in the pictures are doing (The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My, for instance). I’m just going to call them all picture books for simplicity’s sake. As I say, its entirely academic, but it’s amazing what difference one push of the space bar does.

Words & Pictures

A good picture book is a carefully calibrated work of art. Every page becomes more like a canvas, a big white space of creativity with completely different rules to the layout of a novel. But as with all art there’s rules to what makes it good; in this case a balance between captivating words and eye-catching pictures. It’s not as simple as writing a pleasant little story and pasting in a drawings here and there; a novel with the odd picture is not a picture book, otherwise Great Expectations would be one of the best-selling picture books of all time. No, the two have to complement each other and the style of story they’re telling.

Words…

When it comes to words, you don’t need many, but every one of them needs to count. To see the best of this pick up one of the Rev. W. Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine books, which are written with the textual economy of a Hemingway novel. It’s beautiful. It only takes him, on average, about 850 words to tell a story, and there’s not a word wasted. Most picture books use a similar amount or less. More and a child’s attention starts to drift or they fall asleep before the end of the story. But length is really your only limit, and you can be as imaginative with the presentation and distribution of words as you want. Double-spacing, paragraph indentations, Times New Roman… it all goes out the door. You can make words bigger, smaller, different colours, different fonts, upside down, rhyming. Be as Seussian as you fancy. Just make sure they reflect what’s going on in the pictures.

… & Pictures

Unlike in a comic book, the pictures are there to repeat the action described in the text, rather than fill in a missing portion. Pictures are where your book will truly come alive and a great illustrator – whether that’s you or someone else – can make something that’ll sit in the image centres of little readers for the rest of their lives (think Babar or the Moomins or our old friend that ravenous caterpillar). It doesn’t have to be fluffy animals, pastel colours, and smiley people either. Neil Gaiman’s Wolves in the Walls is a scary tale, made delightfully terrifying by Dave McKean’s creepy illustrations of hollow-eyed children and slavering wolves bursting out from the cavity insulation.

Generally art reflects the sort of story it’s telling, but occasionally it can be set in counterpoint, usually to tone down subjects that might scare kids. Raymond Briggs, writer of kid’s Christmas favourite The Snowman, also wrote When the Wind Blows, a picture book/comic hybrid which features Briggs’ trademark friendly illustrations depicting a horrific subject, in this case an elderly couple succumbing to the effects of radiation poisoning in a post-nuclear Britain.

And finally don’t think you just have to write for the little ones, picture books can be for big kids too. Check out Andrew Kolb’s wonderful ‘Space Oddity’, which takes the David Bowie song and turns it into a hauntingly beautiful picture book. It’s a delight to look at and it goes to show that the picture book, at whatever age you read it or have it read to you, is a wonderful thing. So give it a go and entertain a kid, even if it’s just your inner one.

—————————————————————————————————————————
Have you tried to write a picture book? What is it about them that you find so wonderful, and so cool? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

Images courtesy of io9.com, Gao Guangyan and Telegraph.

Advertise here via BSA

Ask any writer who their worst critic is and they will more than likely answer, “Me”. We are notorious for being hard on ourselves, and heaping unnecessary pressure onto our work, which only serves to make our writing more difficult.

I think that a major problem, especially for unpublished writers, is that we think our story has to be worthy of publication.

Worthy?

What makes a novel worthy? A lot of us, especially in the middle of writing our novels, probably think that it has something to do with a novel being a game-changer, an interesting social commentary, a story that challenges our perceptions, something that raises concerns about a problem in our society, or something equally high-concept.

In short, we feel that our story has to be important.

Take The Pressure Off

If we are writing with the idea that our novel has to be important in some way, then that is an incredible amount of pressure to be putting on yourself! You will find yourself constantly comparing your novel-in-progress with the great pillars of literature that you probably aspire to, works of great and world-changing genius such as Orwell’s 1984, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. These writers, and the masterpieces they have written, are the exceptions to the rule. They stand out through their genius. But this does not mean that every other novel filling the shelves of your local bookstore is rubbish, or doesn’t have anything to say, or isn’t worthy of publication.

Yes, your novel will most likely never be as good as these masterpieces. So?

It doesn’t have to be.

Focus on the Writing

So, how do we get away from this unnecessary pressure? The first and best way is to forget about everything extraneous like theme and symbolism, and concentrate deeply on your writing. Forget about trying to “say something” and just write. Think about what is happening in your story, and write it.

Focus on story, because it doesn’t get more important than that. A reader has to want to keep turning the pages. So write characters that they can care about, with motivations they can believe in, and forget all that other stuff. Chances are it will, at least in part, take care of itself. And if you end up with an awesome, exciting, interesting story, do you really mind if it doesn’t say anything about the human condition or change the way people think?

Write Trash!

The second way of making sure you don’t get buried under self-imposed pressure is to focus on writing good ole’ fashioned entertainment. Just because a novel is written for enjoyment’s sake, doesn’t make it a bad book. Of course it doesn’t.

Go ahead and write pure, unadulterated trash. Who cares if it isn’t literary? And by ‘trash’ I don’t mean it in a disparaging way. Trash doesn’t mean badly written or poorly researched. It can be pulpy, sexy, violent… but above all, entertaining. Many mainstream authors (incredibly successful ones too like Stephen King) often get branded as trash. That doesn’t stop millions of people enjoying his stories, and getting a huge kick out of being scared and excited when reading his work. Romance novels are another good example of so-called “trash”. I’m not a fan personally, but I can see the attraction. As long as it’s well-written, and fun, and has an enjoyable story, who cares?

So, worthy?

Going back to question of worth in this article’s title. Is your story worth being told? The answer is: yes, if it is important to you. If your story and your characters are important to you, then they will be important to someone else. Maybe a lot of “someone elses”. And that is truly a wonderful thing.

Images courtesy of William Warby and Jill Catley.

Advertise here via BSA

Today, MJ Henry takes us through her writing life, and the different things that have motivated her to write, and asks the same question of you…

When I was a kid, growing up in a small, Texas town, I found that when I wrote my “stories”, I would have a large audience on the playground, any day after lunch, just by bringing my most recent chapter to read. I guess I really liked the feeling of importance. More than that, I really liked the feeling I got while I was putting my thoughts on paper. This phenomenon continued through junior high school and high school. I would write and share; but I never saved anything.

Growing

How I wish I still had those early stories to read now. What a difference I would see; what growth I would identify. Those early stories, I remember, were along the lines of the Nancy Drew mysteries. I think I saw myself as a great mystery writer. By the time I was in high school, I think I had graduated into some of the stranger stories similar to what I write now.

After I became an adult, I only remember writing a few more things. I wrote one story based on a recurring nightmare I had as a child. I wrote this at the suggestion of a counselor. Through the writing of this story and some sketches I did to illustrate it, I was able to write my way through the pains of my childhood. Later, after the earliest Star Wars movies and the first Star Trek movie came out, I wrote a sci-fi for my kids. Again, I had an audience to listen as each chapter emerged. I found it to be a way to draw my kids and me closer together.

Life in the Way?

After that, I put my writing aside for a very long time. Life got in the way, as it always seems to do. I told myself I didn’t have time to write. That, however, would have been the best time of all to write. When your kids are growing up there are always so many funny things and so many sweet things that they do. Now I have to rely on a faulty memory to get them down on paper; and there are a few things that I feel are worth doing just that. I only hope that I can remember the details well enough to turn them into stories, before I can no longer remember.

Now, here I am, retired at sixty-one and needing something to fill my time. I went the Facebook virtual farming route. There is just so much virtual farming a person can do. It’s not like you’re going to take your virtual veggies and make a virtual salad, so you can invite all your virtual friends to a virtual feast after virtual church. After a while it gets virtually boring.

Looking Back

So, why do I write? Because I am a virtual nut case? Okay; maybe I’m just a little obsessive and somewhat creative. Writing is something that I have been storing up inside of me for a number of years. I stored it so long that the silos of my heart and mind were about to burst open and spill all the grain it had stored up onto a virtual field; I like to think it is a field of Texas bluebonnets. These silos are splitting at the seams now and the stories are steadily seeping out. It’s all that I can do to scoop them up and pour them out onto my laptop.

Why Do You Write?

Go on, ask yourself this question. What makes you put things on paper? It can often be quite a hard question to answer, but it is an important one. We should all, at some point, take a look at ourselves to find out what really motivates us to write, to better understand our own writing. Is it something that you have always done? If you were told that you could never write another thing; what would you do?

Please share your feelings, and the reasons why you write, in the comments section below!

Image courtesy of Amy Alldis.

Advertise here via BSA

At Fuel Your Writing, we try to bring you all the best advice, tips, inspiration and interesting articles to give you what you need to, literally, fuel your own writing endeavours, whatever they may be.

Today we are launching a fortnightly column where you, the FYW community, will have the chance to email us with your writing questions – anything from productivity to goal setting, from time management to good writing practices. They will be answered by our newest regular writer, professional writing coach Cynthia Morris.

So, What Would You Like to Know?

My hope is that this column will help to increase the interactivity of Fuel Your Writing, and allow you all to engage with us in a deeper way and to directly ask the questions that you want answering. We invite you to share your burning issues, problems that you are facing in your writing process. The chances are great that a lot of other members of the Fuel Your Writing community are dealing with the same issues, and by answering your questions we hope to help everyone to become better writers.

Please – get in touch! Send your questions and the issues that you would like discussed, either in the comments of this post or emailed to us at Fuel Your Writing.

We look forward to helping you Save Your Writing!

Image courtesy of Rajiv Patel.

Advertise here via BSA

What makes you think you can write a book? Your own show – are you kidding?! Phht!!

You’ve heard this kind of derisive commentary. Not from others – from inside your own mind. It’s inevitable. When you take action toward your dreams, your fears and the voice of your inner critic expand in proportion to your passion.

The inner critic – or gremlin, as coaches call it – presents very convincing arguments. So convincing that you may believe its negativity and squelch your creativity as a result of its haranguing. To be a successful creative, you need to master this negative voice.

Gremlin wrestling is the first order of business with my clients. They’re always surprised that after years of ineffectual battle with the critic, the best defense against the gremlin is to befriend it.

That Jerk = My Friend?

I know. It seems odd to buddy up with the bully that has belittled you for years. But this simple approach to living with your inner critic can empower you to reach your creative goals with less struggle. Here’s how.

Isolate your gremlin. Pay attention to it as a distinct part of you. On a daily basis, notice what it says, the language it uses, and what provokes its commentary.

I liken this to inviting your gremlin out from the wings onstage, and giving it the mic. It’s on the scene anyway, might as well give it center stage to better hear what it’s contributing.

Once you’ve separated it as one perspective and not the Truth, get to know it.

Who Is Your Inner Critic?

Write about it. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and do a character sketch as if for a story. Explore your gremlin’s world. Use these prompts:

Get a picture of it. Do a drawing, a painting, perhaps even a song describing your gremlin. Choose whatever medium makes this playful yet meaningful.

What did you learn or notice from doing this exercise? Write down any insights you’ve gotten from this.

Living With This Monster In a New Way

Okay, so now you have a distinct picture of your critic and you’ve probably noticed how entrenched he is in your psyche. How do you wrestle control from this downer? Try these new perspectives.

This part of you is smart, wily, knows your sensitive spots, plus seems to always assert the logical voice of ‘reality’. Best to dispassionately observe its story rather than try to argue that yes, you are a good writer.

When your critical voice pipes up, stay light. Humor helps you dodge the heavy messages your gremlin broadcasts in your mind.

Thank the gremlin. Thank it for its input and keep going. I like to say things like: “Thank you for your input. And while I may be a fat, un-stylish loser, I am still going to the party. And I’m going to have fun.”

These strategies help cope with the gremlin, and the following approach makes a truly lasting impact for my clients.

Befriend Your Gremlin

Your critic now has its own discrete place in your psyche, and you feel a little less dominated by its negativity. Still, it insists on contributing whenever you take a creative risk. Rather than trying to muzzle your gremlin, enroll its help.

Ask your gremlin these questions and write your answers.

Please use these specific questions. A client once tweaked the question (creative people often need to add their own twist!) but didn’t get satisfactory results. I pointed her back to the original questions, and she was amazed at the empowering new perspective she received from her answers.

These exercises might seem simple, or silly, even. But complex problems are often solved by simple solutions. Reduce creative resistance by dropping the struggle with your inner critic. Befriend it instead for more joyful and easy creativity.

For more on managing your inner critic, see Rick Carson’s Taming Your Gremlin.

How does your gremlin bug you? Have you learned to live with him/her/it? Are they your best friend already?! Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

Image courtesy of Inti.

Advertise here via BSA

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. – Stephen King

Sometimes I think we forget that reading, as well as actually writing, is one of the fundamental skills needed to write well. Besides being an incredibly enjoyable and rewarding pastime (it is my own belief that we grow as a person with every book we read, whether it is good or bad), reading is the diet of a writer.

From everything that you read, be it classics, crime, romance, graphic novels, science-fiction, horror, or anything else for that matter, there is something to take to improve your writing. This can be that you learn of something to do, and it can be even about learning what not to do. If you’ve just read a book and you hated it or found it hard to read, have a look at why you didn’t like it. And then avoid doing that thing in your own work.

With this post, I had thought of going through my recently read books and talking about how I felt they had helped me improve and develop my writing. However, I think it would be much more interesting, and in the end more helpful, if I threw the floor open to you all. So, I’d like to ask you the question…

What Are You Reading?

What are you reading right now? Or what have you just read? This doesn’t have to be a book that you love, as I said above you might be really struggling with this book, but that in itself will be telling you about something you perhaps shouldn’t be doing in your writing. I’d like you all in the comments below to share what you are writing and how it helps your own writing. It’s as simple as that. I’m sure we can build up a fantastic collection of useful insights and advice on how we can better our writing, and it will be interesting to see where they come from. I also hope that it will show how important it is for us as writers to indulge and immerse ourselves in our reading, and not to neglect it. Sometimes it may feel like we are wasting time by just reading, but it really is time well spent.

So, to get the ball rolling, here we go:

What Am I Reading?

Well, I’ve just finished Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I’d never actually read it before, but of course I knew what a masterpiece it is considered, and I’m obviously aware of its impact on literature and the horror genre. After reading it, I am not at all surprised at the impact it had. It really is a wonderfully written, well-realised story on what it means to be human, the thirst for knowledge and it is just a brilliant tale of both horror and, in fact, probably one of the first examples of science fiction. I loved it, as I expected I would.

What Did I Learn From It?

Reading masterful writing like that in Frankenstein is always an absolute joy, and it has really inspired me to work hard at my writing. If someone such as Shelley can write such an important, powerful novel at the tender age of nineteen, then why can’t I? Why can’t you?

Apart from the inspiration, something else that I took from Frankenstein was its interesting narrative structure. It begins with letters sent by a man who rescues Victor Frankenstein from the ice, and it is to this man that Victor then recounts what has happened. In this way the story is told in a very direct manner, and it made me the reader feel as though this tale is being told personally to me. Also, Shelley’s decision to write several chapters from the monster’s point-of-view was, at the time, revolutionary, and brings a powerful perspective to the novel.

So… Please Share Your Thoughts!

Please let us know what you are reading, and how the writing has helped you develop your own skills, in the comments below. I’m really looking forward to see what you’re all reading and the skills you’re learning!

Images courtesy of me!

Advertise here via BSA

Do you know what Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Louis de Conte, and Mark Twain have in common? You may well do, because they’re all the same man. Samuel Clemens, writer and wit, was a prodigious user of pen names, but have you ever thought why? In fact, why do any authors spend years of their life crafting their novels, only to slap another name on them?

Nom de plume, alias, pseudonym, literary double…there are a lot of synonyms out there for the act of writing under a different name, and just as many reasons for using one. Back in the days of tall hats, gaslights, and institutionalised sexism there was a reason for women like Charlotte Bronte and Mary Ann Evans to assume a pen name, but these days such bars to entry don’t exist. Anyone, male or female, can write a book, so by all rights pen names should be a historical hangover. Yet writers of both sexes still love to use them.

Let’s look at just some of the many reasons why…

All in a Name

If your name is Thelonius Q. Hornswaggle you may not like the way your name looks on the top of a manuscript. Or if your name is one shared by thousands and thousands of others, like John Smith, you might think you need something less normal so that you stand out. But you don’t want a name to stand out too much: if you happen to share the same name as a celebrity or another author it’s probably best to assume a nom de plume, otherwise you run the risk of being overshadowed or misleading people – that’s why there aren’t any authors called Brad Pitt.

Type of Book

If you’re writing fantasy or a period book having an appropriate pen name may help to the tone of the whole book. Western novelist Zane Gray felt ‘Zane’ was more in keeping with the style of his genre than with his real name, Pearl. Let’s say you’ve written a crime drama set in the dank and fetid backstreets of Elizabethan London. Using a name like Erasmus Olimander not only looks cool on a manuscript/dust jacket, but adds to the atmosphere and mystery of the book. Going even further, the name can actually be a part of the story, for example if you’re writing a fictional biography or autobiography, like Lemony Snicket.

On the topic of style, while anyone of any sex can write any style of book, a trip to your bookshop will show you that certain styles are dominated by certain genders. Books about war and spying and fighting off crocodiles with a machete are mostly written by male authors, while female authors dominate the expansive romance section (I refuse to use the modern term ‘chick-lit’ – no one comes off well in that description). So if you’re a chap who’s written a great romance story you might feel a little conspicuous putting a male name on it. There’s no reason you should of course, however you might feel that a male name atop ‘The Ladies of Lily Cottage’ will adversely affect your chances of it being picked up by a publisher or a reader.

It’s a Marketing Thing

If you write across a wide range of genres or write both fiction and non-fiction then you or your publisher may decide it’s best to employ a pen name for some of the things you write. This is especially important with an author who writes both fiction and non-fiction. Charles Dodgson, author of mathematics textbooks such as ‘A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry’, wrote some distinctly algebra-free books that you might have heard of under the name Lewis Carroll.

Sci-fi novelist Iain M. Banks is probably the most famous modern day example of an author writing under two names, keeping the ‘M’ in his name for all his sci-fi novels, and dropping it to become just Iain Banks for his ‘mainstream’ works. Incidentally, the only reason he had to drop the ‘M’ from his name in the first place was because unbelievably his publishers thought it ‘too fussy’ for his first novel. Once he started selling books that soon changed. It’s not the only time a publisher has asked an author to use a pen name for reasons that smack of profit rather than clarity. Believe it or not, Stephen King was forced to write under the pen name Richard Bachmann by his publishers, because they felt the public would not buy more than one novel from an author in a single year. They were soon proved very, very wrong.

You’re Scared

Perhaps the book you’re writing is an expose that would get you into trouble. Maybe you feel that writing under a pseudonym will make receiving rejection letters that little bit less hard to take personally because it’s your literary alter-ego taking the criticism/rejection and not your name atop the dreaded ‘thanks for your interest’ boilerplate. Both are really good reasons.

A handful of writers use a nom de plume because they feel being a writer will affect their chances of employment when going for a job. They think that if a prospective boss looks up your name on line and sees you’re a writer then they may think you’ll just pack in the job and leave should your career take-off. Personally I find this completely unlikely, and if you think this has ever happened to you then you probably need a better CV, not a nom de plume. C.S. Lewis did publish poetry under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton in order to avoid damaging his reputation as an Oxford don, although I still really don’t know why he felt the need to when he had made his career writing about a talking magic Lion.

It’s Cool!

Everyone likes to have a secret, and the idea of having a hidden literary identity is about as close to being Batman as you’ll ever get. Plus it’s fun coming up with your own alias, especially if you manage to conceal it in an ana form. “Rory Bleedstem”. See? I just did it there, and what fun it was. Go on, give it a go. You don’t have to use it, but coming up with cool new names is a good exercise for a budding author, and you can always put them in your novel. That’s assuming you want people to know it’s your novel…

If you use or have ever used a pen name I’d love to hear why you used one and whether you felt it helped/hindered you in any way. Get in touch in the comments below!

Images link to original source.