Halloween is on its way; time to get out Boney, our life-size skeleton decoration. He’s been around for several years now. His skull fell off his neck, but we repaired him and now he’s sitting in a fold-out chair on our porch, waving at passers-by, his skeleton hand high in the air.
It seems that the only time we look up is when our phone is held up arm’s length to capture another selfie. With us always in the foreground, the background has become increasingly unimportant.
I don’t know if you’re like me, but watching all the disasters taking place recently has left me feeling forlorn for the loss of life and property, and less than positive about the future.
I wrote one blog on the tools one can use for productivity before at and all of those tools still stand. They’re all great. What I found was that I used too many at once and that didn’t end up working well for me as I spent more time inputting and checking off than was necessary.
Over the summer I’ve been reading a lot (haven’t we all?) and I’ve realised that my reading has changed a little as I’ve started to write more and with the hindsight of what I’ve learned along the way.
We’ve all heard the first commandment for writers: never open your book with backstory. And the second commandment? No infodumps. And the third? Sprinkle that backstory throughout your book.
From a writer’s standpoint, what does success look like? Does it mean freedom and independence? Recognition? When you visualize yourself as a successful writer, what do you see?
Novels, J.D. Salinger wrote, grow in the dark. By that, he meant that true creativity comes from the subconscious mind, from allowing ideas time to percolate below our conscious awareness.
Summer is still with us but “back to school” is just around the corner (or already here in some places) and I’ve started to assess what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks and figure out what will be my focus as fall approaches.
Do protagonists have to be likeable? Of course, because how else can a reader bond with your hero? Of course not, because some of the most fascinating protagonists in literature are unlikeable, or indeed, hateful.
One of the most challenging projects writers face is promotion. How to describe our beautiful books? How to break down the book into effective social media posts? Why didn’t anyone mention this in the creative writing seminar?
As a business writer, I came to writing articles late in life. Eventually, from 2004 to 2013, I wrote over 400 and posted them out there in the world — on my own blogs; on other peoples’ websites, and on article banks.
Writers write because they must, and it helps a great deal to be unswervingly optimistic as one writes draft after draft in an attempt to make the work better with each successive try.
The first thing to determine is how you see things. How does your brain work? Some people need everything on paper in a notebook where they can physically touch a page – while others like to store items on the computer. Do you need it to be accessible everywhere? Like in the cloud?
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