Every weekday at 4:35pm, the local oldies station here in Chicago showcases a song by the Beatles. Before the song plays, however, the host tells the story behind the song (without actually giving away the song’s title). These are always very interesting stories that show how the Beatles struggled to create many of their hit songs, and how the group was often filled with a lot of internal strife, especially in the later years.

I have come to look forward to 4:35 for a variety of reasons: The interesting Beatles story, the good music, and the realization there are only 25 short minutes until I can jump into my car and speed home to resume my normal life.

A few days ago, the broadcast really caught my attention. It focused on John Lennon, who I think it’d be safe to say, knew a thing or two about being creative. The song that they featured was Nowhere Man. Although I don’t have an exact quote of what the radio host said, this Wikipedia entry is pretty darned close:

Lennon, however, claimed that he himself was the subject of the song. He wrote it after racking his brain in desperation for five hours, trying to come up with another song for Rubber Soul. "I’d actually stopped trying to think of something," he said. "Then I thought of myself as Nowhere Man — sitting in his nowhere land.

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In honor of today being Valentine’s Day, I was going to write a brilliant post that connected this holiday of love to literature in a way that would fascinate everyone. But then, I was doing some research for this post, I came across so many collections of "Valentine’s Day love poems" and other sappy works, that I had an epiphany. I realized that all those poems are stuff many of you read back in grade school. There’s nothing new. Nothing exciting.

I also thought about going into the history of Valentine’s Day. However, a quick search on Google showed me that the history of this holiday is pretty well known and already condensed into easy-reading form via Wikipedia (which I took the liberty of linking to in the first sentence of this post). I concluded that me writing a Valentine’s Day history would be like reinventing the wheel.

Part of the problem, I admit, is that I hate Valentine’s Day. I don’t get excited about it and I’m sick of everyone asking me what I’m doing today to celebrate. My answer is always the same: "Nothing!" No cards. No flowers. No gifts. Just business as usual.

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I’m a pretty high-strung guy. I get stressed out easy and if my little routines get out of whack, I think the world is coming to an end. I also worry about things that I probably don’t need to worry about. But that’s just me.

Regardless if you’re high-strung or not, chances are that if you’re a writer, then there are times when you get stressed out. Deadlines are approaching too fast. The creativity isn’t flowing like it used to. You’re laptop fell down the stairs and you lost that 1000-page novel you’ve been slaving over for the last five years (and you didn’t even back your work up).

Writers face a lot of stress, which can start to hurt your writing if you’re not careful. With this in mind, I thought I’d write a post about easy ways a writer can relax. None of these methods take a lot of time or cost money you don’t have. Actually, these relaxation methods can be done just about anywhere!

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If you’re a writer, you might be gripping the edge of your desk in anger, thinking I finally cracked. Or, maybe you’re checking the news to see if hell has finally froze over. After all, it’s not every day that a blog about literature and writing blatantly says that spelling is not important – right in the title!

You can take a deep breath and relax because I think good spelling is important in any piece of writing. However, if you’re spending a large amount of time looking up large words in the dictionary while writing a rough draft for that new short story, you’re probably not making good use of valuable writing time.

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Okay, maybe not stellar, but definitely better…

Like most writers, I’m not just limited to fiction. In fact, doing so would probably do more harm than good and I don’t see the logic behind such limitations. Thus, I often finding myself writing copious amounts of non-fiction in the form of these blog posts, various articles, varying online content, letters and so forth.

Writing non-fiction can be very challenging, especially since there must be a good amount of truthfulness to your words. I’m sure you remember the trouble James Frey got into when it was revealed his book A Million Little Pieces turned out to be more fiction than fact. More than that, however, you still must engage your readers when writing a non-fiction piece, especially if the facts are widely known.

Writing an article or even a blog post can be daunting. Getting it wrong can mean everything to shame, embarrassment, and in very extreme cases a lawsuit or two. So, I thought it might be good to post a few "pointers" I have picked up over the years that have helped me overcome many obstacles in writing non-fiction.

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Warning: Grammar content ahead!

I used to think the English language was clean and family-oriented.  But it turns out she has a dirty side. You probably figured this out from the title. Lurking beneath the clean, polished exterior of English is a sub-culture of dangling modifiers, dipthongs (not really a grammar problem, it just sounds funny), and even those stinky colons!

It’s rare that I forge into the world of grammar on this blog. Why? Because the internet is loaded with information about grammar and book stores/libraries are stacked to the ceiling with books about how to improve your grammar.

From time to time, however, I’ll notice a problem either in my own writing or other people’s writing and decide it’s worth mentioning here on Brad’s Reader. Dangling modifiers is one of those mistakes that is easy to make. The good news is that this pesky problem is also very easy to catch and fix – if you know what to look for.

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One thing I like about ringing in the New Year is the feeling that I’m somehow starting over. I know it sounds absurd, as the difference between December 31 and January 1 isn’t all that great – life still goes on. But psychologically, it’s a powerful idea to think that you can, in a sense, start over in your life and fix all those ugly mistakes you’ve made in the past.

Writing offers you that same opportunity. For example, you’re working on a piece of short fiction and you’re not at all happy with how things are turning out. It’s very easy to just start over with a clean page (or computer screen) and write the story like you imagined it.

Isn’t that like giving up?
Not exactly. If you give up, it means that you threw the unfinished story into a file with no plans of ever working on it again. I’m talking about starting over. Sometimes a story (or even a novel, poem, article, whatever the case might be) is beyond just a little editing and re-writing a few paragraphs. I’ve done this many times with my own short fiction and even my blog posts.

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Writing fiction is hard. Any serious writer would probably agree with that statement. Even when you’re writing a short story, you still have to consider setting, plot, character development, voice, tense, narrative structure…and the list goes on. And each of those items have many subsets – like a tree branching out. As many of you know, keeping track of all this can get really complicated really fast.

However, for today I’m just going to focus on a small part of character development: your character’s thoughts. Surely your character thinks, right? Often what a character says and does is only part of the story (no pun intended). For example, on the outside, a character can appear confident and strong because of what they say and the actions they take. But on the inside, they can be in complete turmoil.

Showing your character’s thoughts can be tricky. At the very best, your character’s "inner life" will be just as interesting as his/her "outer life". At the very worst, your character’s thoughts will be boring and turn the reader off to your entire story. Here’s a tip I learned about many years ago. It works well, just don’t overdo it:

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Last week I did a series of posts about being a more prolific writer. I didn’t plan on writing any more posts on the subject for now, but I came across another blog posting on Copyblogger today that really gets to the heart of why many writers aren’t more productive: fear!

The first example of fear given is the fear of failure. This rings most true with me. For example, when I’m writing a rough draft of a short story, I’m already starting to fear what others will think of it. Even when I’m just writing the first paragraph I start to catch myself thinking "This opening is no good, no one will like it."  I’ll then proceed to keep starting over until I’m satisfied with the first paragraph – all the while forgetting it’s just a rough draft.

Only when I make a conscious effort to block out that fear of failure and just write do I really become productive, and the quality of my writing starts to improve as well. When you finish the rough draft and start the editing process, then you can fret over each word (there are limits to editing too, of course, but that’s for another post).

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This post will wrap up my series on being a more prolific writer. I meant to have this up by Friday, or Saturday at the very latest, but other things distracted me. So I apologize for those of you waiting in suspense for the final post in the series.

Being a prolific writer means writing large quantities of material. To do that, one must be productive. To be productive as a writer, one must spend a consistent amount of time writing (notice I didn’t say "a large amount of time" or even "a lot of time", consistency is key). But as the week wore on, I began thinking "Does being a prolific writer really matter?" Then I narrowed it down to a matter of Quality Vs. Quantity.

During my last semester at college, one of my English professors told us that he would much rather have us write a killer essay that might be a page or so under the minimum requirement, then write a 30-page essay that is filled with fluff and constantly repeating the same points over and over again. This is a prime example of quality ruling over quantity. This isn’t to say, however, that you can’t start out with a 30-page essay and then cut it down to a focused and crisp piece of writing through editing and lots of hard work.

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