Writing

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open. (Natalie Goldberg)  - I saw this on twitter.  Need to look up who N.G. is

 Ten Commandments for Happy Writers  - these are good.

Pen's advice to Tim, a would-be-writer 

 “Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”  (C.S. Lewis)


An approach to writing her second novel (Renske Jonkman) "I really want my second novel to be different from the first. Therefore, I am currently trying to reinvent myself. For inspiration I collect everything I find interesting in a scrapbook. It contains everything from clippings of article about politics to photographs that touch me."

 Before you finish writing for the day, get some clarity about the next story or paragraph. Hold the baton out so you can grab it tomorrow.   (Donald Miller)

Write tight. (For impact)  - Rick Warren, twitter

 Steps For Memoir-Writing     (Wayne Groner)
      1. Decide format. Will you write a memoir about a segment of your life, a biography about your whole life, or a family history?

            2. Decide motivation. Do you write to inform, to save information, to heal?

            3. Read what you like and look for clues how to write the same.

            4. Make a list of memories and remembers scenes from your life.

            5.Write in your natural voice, as you speak.

            6.  Free write in the beginning without any editing.

            7. Open with action or dazzling beginning.

            8. Show, not tell.

            9. Use dialogue.

          10. Let yourself write about painful memories.

          11. Ask trusted people for editing reads.    

          12. Edit, edit, edit.

Was stuck in my writing this morning. So I started a separate chapter and flew through it. Write where the wind is blowing!  (Donald Miller)

Ramblings of a Literary Agent 

Blogging resources

To Tweet or Not to Tweet 

http://littlepinkhouse.net
Typeface on Anne Barone's website is...Apricot from Canada Type by Rebecca Alaccari (with inspiration from a typeface by A. R. Bosco popular in the 1930s-40s.) The typeface, similar to the script on handwritten menus in French cafes, is upright, round, bold, feminine, and distinctly young in appearance — like chic French women.

More writing tips 

Writing rooms of famous people HERE. 

" In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasure of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, “This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong.”  And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing.  After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you’ve been avoiding all along – your wounds.  This is very painful.  It stops a lot of people early on who didn’t get into this for the pain.  They got into it for the money and the fame.  So they either quit, or they resort to a type of writing that is sort of like candy making.
Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.  Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician – the last egalitarian and open associations.  No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen."  (Anne LaMotte, Bird by Bird)

 

Pages... for your writer's notebook

Personalize your pages to fit your needs

You could fill your notebook chronologically, but I'd find that format difficult to utilize. Instead I write lists. Here's a list of some of the pages I have in my writer's notebook:

Article ideas
Publishers to query
Character names, sometimes with character traits
Novel titles
Descriptive passages or phrases
YA novel ideas
Fragments of real conversations
Lines (that I'd like to include in a novel)
Sub plot ideas
Humor clips
Writers to read
How to fix my novel
Short story ideas
Comparisons and descriptions
Children's novel ideas
Research
"Mom" article ideas (your passion may vary)
A plan for 2008
Cool lines that beg to be used
E-book ideas
Website development
Themes to use in story development
Horror plots
Autobiography notes
Quotes about writing