Ready…get set…go! Today marks the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) – where you have 30 stress filled fun filled days to get that novel out onto paper for the world to enjoy. Not too long ago, I wrote this post about NaNoWriMo. If you haven’t already started writing (depending on the time zone you’re in), you are already behind!

I am not going to be participating this year because I have too many other writing projects on my plate and I’m concentrating on keeping this blog moving in new directions. But my good blogging buddy Melissa over at Writing Forward is participating and is seeking out writing buddies.

Continue Reading

In all the years I have been writing, and in all the writing projects I have undertaken – whether fiction, articles, blog posts, essays, etc, one thing that has always held true is that if the momentum of my writing project dies, the project will probably be doomed.

You are probably asking, "What is this momentum you’re talking about"? When I refer to momentum in this post, I’m talking about keeping a writing project going until it is done. This means writing every day and always making progress – always moving forward.

How does the momentum die? Usually, you start to lose your momentum on a writing project when you let it sit unfinished for a few days. Or even worse, a few weeks go by without even looking at your partial manuscript. Your imagination will no longer be engaged in your story and it will take all that much more effort to get the momentum going.

Continue Reading

There is a lot of pleasure in reading a good novel. For me, one of those pleasures is immersing myself in the into the world of the character/s. A well-written character can start to appear like a real person, and I often find myself feeling their pain when something goes wrong, or celebrating their joy at even the smallest of victories.

But what happens when you finish reading the novel? I often find myself thinking about the future of the character, or how they would react to hypothetical situations that my imagination plunges them into. One book that stands out in my mind is Forty Signs of Rain (aff link) by Kim Stanley Robinson. The book is the first in a trilogy and introduces us to a character named Frank. Frank is an awkward loner type who eventually makes his home in a tree house he built in one of the Washington D.C. parks. He’s one of those characters I obsess about long after finishing the book (or in this case, the series of books).

Creating a virtual world for characters

I was highly intrigued when I came across this article from The Guardian website. It talks about a character named Steffi McBride, who is the lead in a novel called The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride by Andrew Crofts. And what makes her so interesting is not so much the novel (although that plays a large part) but Steffi’s "life" outside the novel:

But what, arguably, makes Steffi more interesting than your average airhead celeb is that she’s the figment of an author’s imagination and these tantalising – or annoying – insights into her star-studded existence come courtesy of her updates on Twitter the social media "microblogging" site, and her Facebook page.

Yes, Steffi has a Twitter account and a page on Facebook. On the one hand, it’s not that surprising. A popular character can probably do pretty well on such social networking sites, and it can only boast the novel’s popularity among fans. On the other hand, however, I’m inclined to think many people will see this as over-the-top. Part of the magic of certain characters is their lives within the framework of the novel. If they set a metaphorical foot outside of that, things can start to appear wishy-washy.

Continue Reading

Like I said in this post, I usually take my time reading my beloved Poets & Writers magazine. Well, today I read an article that shook me to the bone.

The article was an expose on writer Andrew Porter and detailed any writer’s worst nightmare. After working tirelessly on a collection of short stories, he lost everything. Here’s a quick excerpt that tells about Porter coming home from a friend’s house:

When he returned home, around one in the morning, his apartment had been ransacked. "Everything was gone," Porter remembers, "my stereo, my CDs, my clothes, my computer, my disks with all my backed-up stories, even the little briefcase where I kept all of my hard copies. In other words, everything I’d written that year, almost everything I’d ever written, was gone." (Poets & Writers Nov/Dec 2008 107-8).

Yikes! That is very scary. Even the hard copies were taken! Needless to say, it took Porter a while to recover from this incident and he almost gave up on writing altogether.

Continue Reading

Today I was thrilled to get in the mail my copy of Poets & Writers Magazine (aff link), as it is one of the very few print subscriptions I have maintained over the years. I usually read the articles over a period of a week or two. But tonight, being a lazy Saturday night, I decided to dive in early.

One article in particular caught my eye – an article about travel writing. I was intrigued because I love to write (obviously), and I also love to travel. While I have never combined the two and written articles about my travels, it remains one of those elusive dreams to get paid as a globe-trotting writer.

The article makes a few really good points. The first point that jumped out is that travel writing is not the same thing as writing guidebooks (ie. those destination guides you pick up at the newsstand at your airport). Rather, travel writing provides a narrative of your journey and contains all the elements of a story (beginning, middle, end, etc).

Continue Reading

Forget the presidential elections. Forget the historical economic crisis we are facing. In one month (actually, it’s now less than a month), perhaps the most important even of the year will take place: National Novel Writing Month (more popularly known as NaNoWriMo)!

For those writers who have been living under a rock for the past several years, NaNoWriMo is a writing marathon event where writers everywhere try to write a complete novel in the timespan of one month. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details here, because this cool website pretty much explains it all.

I first heard about the annual contest during the fall 2004, in a small poetry club I belonged to at the community college I attended (right before I transfered to the university). My reaction was one of excitement and a little skepticism.

Continue Reading

Where should writers go on the internet to help them with their craft? Well, there’s a new list out – the Top 10 Blogs for Writers. Here are the first three blogs from the list:

1. Copyblogger

2. Men with Pens

3. Freelance Writing Jobs

What are the remaining 7 blogs on the list? You’ll just have to click here to find out!

Continue Reading

The same group that helped in the defense of Roger Rapoport, who was sued after trying to publish The Harry Potter Lexicon (read more about the case here), will become an official tax-exempt organization to help writers with issues on fair use and first amendment rights. I came across this article on Publishers Weekly, which describes the goals of the new organization that will…

…help support other creative artists faced with legal threats or lawsuits.

Additionally, the Right to Write will also collect and help spread information regarding intellectual property issues:

Continue Reading

Move over ebooks, move over print books and what the heck, throw everything you know about writing a novel out the window. Well, maybe not quite everything.

Many of you are probably familiar with the micro-blogging tool called Twitter. Personally, I don’t use the service because I’ve never really had a use for it. And getting sent messages about the minutia of everyday life from people I don’t really know isn’t all that appealing to me.

Now there’s new use for Twitter – writing novels and instantly sending them to your mass following! One such writer, Matt Richtel, wrote about his thriller novel he "published" on Twitter, which he affectionately calls "Twiller" (get it? Thriller + Twitter = Twiller). You can read about his exploits in this post.

Continue Reading

I must be really be scraping the bottom of the barrel if I’m writing about words I hate. Just kidding (nervous laughter)! Actually, this can be an interesting topic because the English language is very much a living one, and is always evolving. Words that are slang today, might find their way into the dictionary tomorrow. Thus it’s no surprise that the Oxford English Dictionary adds about 1000 new words each year (source).

Continue Reading