How to Set Writing Goals with a Family with Author Mayra Calvani

I asked award-winning author Mayra Calvani, who is currently doing a virtual author tour, to share some tips with us today as part of her World of Ink Tour. Mayra not only writes fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. She’s a reviewer for The New York Journal of Books, co-editor of Voice in the Dark ezine and a...Mother. I couldn’t think of a better person to motivate and inspire us today.

Guest post with Award-winning Author Mayra Calvani: How to Set Writing Goals with a Family

“Nothing has a stronger influence

psychologically on their environment

and especially on their children

than the unlived life of the parent.”

--C. G. Jung

You want to start your career as a writer, and you have young kids at home. How do you find the time to write and actually produce something while your children ask you for sandwiches, demand you play with them, or refuse to take a nap? Writing with kids at home isn’t easy, but it can be done.

The following are 7 tips to setting writing goals with a family:

Be realistic

If you set your goals too high, you’ll crash and you’ll be left with feelings of failure, frustration and bitterness. This will have a strong impact on the way you feel about yourself as a mom and wife, and will affect the time you spend with your loved ones. Face it, unless you have a nanny, you won’t have a lot of free time until your kids are old enough to go to pre-school. If you’re not able to set your writing goal to one hour a day, or even half an hour, what about 15 minutes? Start small. Take baby steps. Persistence is vital: If you stick to it, a lot can be accomplished in just 15 minutes a day over a long period of time. In 15 minutes, you can plot a scene, profile or interview a character, write dialogue, do research on a specific topic for your book, etc. Everybody can set aside 15 minutes of writing time.

Get organized

This is the key to succeed! Buy a planner or calendar and schedule your week in advance every Sunday. This way, come Monday morning, you’ll know what to do. What’s the best time to set aside those 15 minutes? Does your child take a morning or afternoon nap? Do you have the type of child who would be happy playing in a playpen by himself while you write? Could you hire a teenager to look after your child twice a week for an hour, while you write in the next room? Perhaps you know other moms who are in a similar situation and who would be interested in taking turns taking care of the kids? Brainstorm various possibilities. When there’s a will, there’s a way.

Stay flexible

You might not always be able to follow your daily writing goals. You know what? That’s perfectly fine. Life often gets in the way. In fact, it feels as if life always gets in the way when you have a family, doesn’t it? The planner is there to keep you motivated, focused, and steered in the right direction. However, those words aren’t set in stone. If you can’t meet your writing goal for that day, just try to get back in track the next. Pat yourself on the back and tell yourself, “I tried my best.” It’s like with a diet. You don’t have to quit the whole diet just because you broke it one day by eating pizza.

Be consistent

Books are made of words, sentences, paragraphs. Depending on how fast a writer or how inspired you are, you can write words, sentences and even a whole paragraph or paragraphs in 15 minutes. The key here is to keep doing it regularly over a long period of time. You have heard it many times: write a page a day, and one year later you have a 365-page book.

Stop procrastinating

If only I had more time!

I’ll write when my kids start school.

I’m always so busy!

When I’ll retire, that’s when I’ll write that book.

Blah, blah, blah. Listen: there’s never a perfect or right time to write. You just have to stop whining and you have to do it. Why leave for later what you can start doing now? Life is short and unpredictable. You have no control over the future. However, you have control over the now.

Love yourself

You work hard. You’re always there for your children, husband, parents, relatives and friends. Why is it that you so often forget about yourself? Treat yourself like a precious jewel. And I’m not talking about being selfish—though being a little selfish is often the best thing you can do to be able to give yourself to others. Reward your accomplishments, however small. When you love yourself, you’ll find the time to set aside those writing times because you know your goals and dreams are important. When you do what’s important to you, you feel accomplished and fulfilled emotionally and intellectually. When this happens, you’re able to give yourself to your family without reservations. Mostly importantly, the quality of those family moments will increase because you won’t resent them.

Set Your Priorities

How badly to do want to become an established author? Can you live with your home not being spotless or dust-free at all times? Or with letting the laundry accumulate once in a while? Because this is, exactly what will happen once you’ve made your decision of becoming an author. You’ll face times when you’ll have to choose between writing or doing the laundry. I’m not saying you should neglect your family and put your writing first. What I’m saying is you don’t have to be a ‘super’ mom at all times.

You have the potential to make your dreams come true. Nevertheless, you have to believe in them and you have to follow a plan. You also have to make them a priority in your life. Keeping these tips in mind will help you achieve your dreams and become a happier writer. As I always say, a happy writer is a happy mama.

 

 You can learn more about Award-winning Author Mayra Calvani, her books, follow future guest post, interviews and her World of Ink Virtual Author Tour at

http://storiesforchildrenpublishing.com/MayraCalvani.aspx

About Mayra Calvani:

Award-winning author Mayra Calvani writes fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. She’s a reviewer for The New York Journal of Books and co-editor of Voice in the Dark ezine. She's had over 300 reviews, interviews, stories, and articles published in print and online. Mayra is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and the Children's Writer's Coaching Club. Visit her website at www.MayrasSecretBookcase.com. She also keeps a blog at www.mayrassecretbookcase.blogspot.com.

February 7th Mayra will be a guest on the Book Marketing Network where she will be sharing about how to pitch our book.

http://thebookmarketingnetwork.com/profiles/blog/list?user=VSGrenier&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_url

Microsoft Word vs OpenOffice.org Writer: It's Not Just About Price

by Scott Rhoades

In recent years, many people--including business, governments, and other organizations--have chosen OpenOffice.org (OOo) over Microsoft Office. The reasons most often cited are cost (OOo is free as in "free beer," while Office definitely isn't) and open standards (OOo is also free as in "free speech").

(Note: In this post "OOo" also includes LibreOffice, the promising new spin-off from OpenOffice.org. Everything I write here about OOo applies to both versions.)

The cost thing is certainly attractive to writers, who typically don't earn enough from our writing to pay the big price tag charged by Microsoft. But many of us buy Office anyway. It is, after all, by far the market share leader and the industry standard. As they say, you get what you pay for, so that high price tag must mean Word is way better than Writer, the word processing component of OOo.

But is it? In some ways, yes, especially the new collaboration features in Word 2010. However, in other ways that are important in the daily work of a writer, Word falls far short.

In this post, I list some of the features that lead me to use OOo far more than I use Word, even though I have free access to Microsoft Office through my job and was able to take advantage of a special offer through work to purchase Office 2010 for about $10. For me, it's not about the price. It's about how OOo helps me work.

Styles and Templates

Both Word and Writer help you create consistent-looking manuscripts with styles and templates. However, that's where the similarity stops. Word has a problem with the way it manages templates. A Word document is tied to the template it uses. If you change a style in the document, it changes the template. Changing the template affects other documents that were created using that template.

In OOo, templates and documents are protected from each other. You assign a template to a document, as you do in Word, but you can change a style to meet the needs of a particular document without affecting the template.

When styles and templates work properly, there is no reason to ever touch the one-off formatting features of your word processor, such as the italics button or the font chooser. When you use a style, it's easy to make changes. If your old manuscript used underlines instead of italics, and you want to use the current preference for italics, you have to go through and look for every underlined word and change it. If you used a style, you only need to change the style and all of those old-timey underlines change to italics at once.

So you want your styles and templates to work in a sane, manageable way. Many writers who have always used Word give up on styles because Word's styles don't work correctly. Writer's do.

Master Documents

Master documents allow you to group a collection of separate files into a single document without losing the flexibility of the separate files. For example, you can keep each chapter or scene in a separate file, and use a master document to assemble your book. The master document is, simply put, a document containing links to the individual files. You still work in the chapter files, but let the master document pull it all together.

The need for this feature is obvious for book writers. So obvious, in fact, that Word used to have it. The problem is, Word's master document feature was notorious for corrupting files. For years, Word users were warned not to use master documents. Some used it with success, but the risk was high and many more learned the hard way that the warnings should have been heeded. Beginning with Office 2007, Microsoft hid the master document feature, claiming that an outline was essentially the same thing. I wasn't even able to find reference to master documents in the Word 2010 help. If it's there, it's buried, and for good reason.

In OOo, however, master documents work beautifully. They even work in an expected way with templates. If you assign a template to a master document, the master document template takes precedence over the templates in the individual files. That means you can create a collection of all those short stories you wrote over the years, and have them look the same across the whole collection, without breaking the styles in the original file. If you want to print the story by itself, it keeps the styles assigned to the file. If you want to include it in a collection of other stories, it takes the styles from the master document to give the collection a consistent look.

And all without file corruption.

Version Tracking

This is another feature Word used to have but caused file corruption. It works in OOo. Basically, you can save different versions of the same document in the same file, so you can easily compare versions or go back to a previous version. If used properly and consistently, this can be a great help in keeping your files organized. The downside is, of course, that ten versions of a document in a single file make the file size grow accordingly, but chances are you're already taking up that much space with several copies of the same document, saved in multiple versions. Unless you have an older computer that's short on memory, the larger file sizes are unlikely to cause you any problems.

Customization

From talking to other writers, I've learned that customizing my tools is more important to me than it is to many people, but for me, this is an important way of making my tools easier to use, and of making me feel like they really are mine.

You can customize so much of the OOo interface that you can quite literally create your own version of the word processor, designed to work the way you do. For example, because I use styles and templates exclusively and almost never use the other formatting features for formatting changes, I have removed the formatting buttons and menus from my OOo toolbars so they are not in my way, taking up space that can be used for macros and other personalizations. If an icon doesn't make sense to you, you can most likely change it. If you have trouble remembering the keyboard shortcut for a frequent action, you can usually change it to something you'll remember. If you think an option is in the wrong menu, move it, or even create your own menus.

Customization doesn't stop there. You can add extensions to OOo to add more features. One that is particularly useful is called Writer Tools, a collection of 18 (last time I counted) tools, some of which are sure to make your writing life easier. For example, you can back up a file in several formats with a single click, quickly get the definition of a word, track the lengths of your writing sessions, and more.

Word has made some advances in customization. For example, there were enough complaints about people not being able to find their way around the Office 2007 ribbon that Office 2010 allows some customization of the ribbon to make your life easier. But this is a far cry from making the program your own. Microsoft is notorious for trying to figure out what you want to do and then doing it for you, whether it's really what you want or not. OOo does some of that too, as do most modern computer programs, but you can almost always change it to do what you really want. Microsoft very rarely gives you that flexibility.

When you can make your tools your own, you don't have to fight against them or try to figure out how the programmers want you to do what you want to do. You feel ownership of the tool, rather than feeling like it was lent to you. This goes back to the open source versus commercial thang: OOo is yours, literally. When you download it and install it, it belongs to you. If you know how, you're even free to change the source code and compile your own version. With Word, you're paying Microsoft a huge fee for a license that allows you to use their program. When you own it, when it's yours, when you can make it work for you the way you like, working with it becomes more enjoyable. You set up your work space so you're comfortable and creative there. Why not your word processor?

Compatibility

You might be thinking this all sounds great, but the fact remains that Word is the industry standard, and if you want to play in the industry game, you have to use their ball. That's true, and I don't have an argument against it.

Fortunately, I don't need to have one. OOo reads and writes Word files. Unless you do some especially complicated formatting, chances are good nobody else will ever be able to tell that you didn't use Word. Auto-numbering can sometimes get messed up, but that happens between versions of Microsoft Word as well, and, in fact, can even be messed up worse between versions of Word than between Word and OOo.

Heck, the LibreOffice spin-off from OOo can even read those dusty old Microsoft Works files that are rotting away on disks you don't want to throw away, but that can't be easily imported into your newer word processor.

It's Your Choice

In the end, the tools each writer chooses depend on several factors, including comfort and familiarity, how well they facilitate writing without getting in the way, and several other professional and personal factors. But you can't make a choice without knowing the options. I hope this post helps you find the word processor that helps you the most. If you're used to Word, you might want to keep using it, even if it frustrates you, because you know it and you're used to its idiosyncrasies. Fair enough. Any change to a new program means you have to learn a new set of weirdnesses, and OOo certainly has its share of those. When you know something well, you don't want to change. But if any of the features I mentioned look interesting to you, check it out. It won't cost you a cent.

Use the following links to get OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, or just to read more about them.

http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.libreoffice.org

And, just for kicks and fairness, although I didn't talk about it here, here's a link to AbiWord, another free word processor that is used by a growing number of writers and gets a share of the love:

http://www.abisource.com/

Ways to Shift Your Thinking

By a raise of hands, how many of you have made a New Year's Resolution to send out queries this year? Me too!
How many have sent one out? Two? Five? GOOD!
Not me. But I will.
And if you haven't sent out any yet, I know you will next next month.
Did the last sentence move you in the direction of action?
Sometimes we humans need a little push to get out of our daily grind/rut/pit.

1. Rather than seeing your goal as something to be achieved, see the outcome as inevitable. It's going to happen.
It's a small shift in thinking, but feel how it changes your perception.  For example, if you had the goal to get your book published, you would think of everything you had to do to get it in the hands of a publisher.
Now BELIEVE and KNOW that your book will be published, that is will happen, that little shift changes the way you think about book and yourself.

2. Focus your attention on your book getting in the right hands and you've created the power to push you forward to a book deal! This saying is on header of my blog:

          Where attention goes... Energy flows... And results show.

3. Here is a great story to illustrate believing in yourself and your goal. It's a great story from Atlanta radio personality Neal Boortz. Before he was a talk show personality, Neal was a practicing attorney. When he was preparing for the Bar Exam, he had many people, including his mom, telling him not to get his hopes up as most people don’t pass the exam the first time.
But Neal had an “inevitability mentality.” While studying for the exam, he shut off all communication with well-meaning family and friends. On exam day, he wore a three-piece suit to the exam –  as though he were already a practicing attorney. He passed.

Now. Put on your author's three-piece suit, sit in your chair, write that query and send it out!

Home Video and Scenes that Move the Plot Forward

by Deren Hansen

Have you ever been subject to the exquisite torture of watching unedited home video? There's nothing like watching half an hour of junior about to take his first bite to make you seriously entertain the notion of gnawing off your own arm to escape.

The problem with unedited home video is that years of watching television and movies has lead us to believe that we should only have to watch the interesting bits.

This lesson applies equally to prose. (Though we usually talk about it in terms of moving the plot forward.)

Jessica Faust, an agent at BookEnds, LLC, explained how every scene must move the plot forward this way:

"In any book you read you’ll notice, sometimes subtly, that every scene has a purpose, and that purpose is to take the reader to the end, or give the reader the information required to get to the end of the book.

"One of the mistakes we often see with beginning authors are those who just love their characters and want you to love them too. They want to welcome you into their world and have you sit and share their experiences. Which is great, but not necessarily the best thing to build a novel on. Now, if that coffee chat is somehow discussing the state of the world you are building, clues from the mystery, or the heroine’s latest romantic adventure, in other words, if it’s moving the plot along, great. Keep it in. If not, you’ll need to find a different way to introduce your characters to readers."

In my own work, I found the analogy between a video scene and a scene in prose very helpful when considering what scenes to use and how to structure them.


Deren blogs daily at The Laws of Making.
Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Using Lists to Write

I don't know about you, but one of the best ways I know of to find ideas for writing is by writing lists. I LOVE lists. So when I found this article "50 Lists to Write to Lift Your Spirits," I immediately saw the application this could have for writing and character development. I think it would be a lot of fun to take one of these lists and make the list as if you were a character from your story.

List as many as you can:

1. People who have influenced or inspired you
2. Things you are grateful for
3. Places you have been
4. Places you want to go
5. Books you’ve read
6. Your favorite things – what brings you joy?
7. Good things that happened this week
8. The best things that happened in the last year
9. The best days of your life.
10. The songs for the soundtrack of your life
11. Acts of kindness you’ve committed
12. Things you want your children to know about you
13. Reasons why you love your significant other
14. The high points for your autobiography
15. People who love you
16. The cutest things your kids ever said
17. Everything you would do if money were no object
18. Favorite gifts you’ve ever received
19. Favorite gifts you’ve ever given
20. Occupations that you have ever wanted to have (including when you were a child)
21. The best advice you’ve gotten.
22. The worst advice you’ve gotten.
23. Things you’re procrastinating
24. Ways you calm yourself down when you’re angry.
25. The best ideas you’ve ever had
26. The best projects or organizations you’ve ever been involved with
27. The ways you have grown since your early 20’s
28. The most beautiful things you’ve ever seen
29. The greatest lessons you have learned
30. Life’s lessons that you learned the hard way
31. Things that have mad you laugh until you cried.
32. Qualities you most admire in others
33. Qualities others most admire in you
34. The elements of an ideal year
35. All the compliments you’ve ever gotten
36. Foods that you have eaten that are so good that others could hear you enjoying them
37. The times you have asserted yourself
38. Things that inspire and energize you
39. The places where you feel completely comfortable to be yourself
40. The most important turning points in your life
41. Times when you looked and felt your absolute best
42. The things you’re good at
43. What you would do with the power of invisibility
44. Things you want to teach your children
45. Things you still want to do in life
46. Bits of trivia that most people don’t know about you
47. The things you love about your body
48. Accomplishments you are most proud of
49. The things you love about your home
50. Who (living or dead) you would invite to your dream dinner party

See the full article here

Anxiety-Free Submissions

Want to submit your writing but don't want to suffer the anxiety and fear that comes with wondering how it will be received? May I suggest the Journal of Ultimate Rejection?

http://www.math.pacificu.edu/~emmons/JofUR/

New Releases of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice

by Scott Rhoades

As writers, our choice of writing tools are extensions of our minds and hands. What we use to write is very important to us. There've been a couple of releases in the past week or so that are worth mentioning. The first is the release of OpenOffice.org 3.3, and the second is the release of the new kid on the block, LibreOffice 3.3.

I'm not going to get into all the new features of the new OpenOffice.org. Most are likely to have little noticeable impact on our daily writing activities, although the more deeply you use the program, the more you're likely to notice.

But I will rave over one new feature.

I have an Internet acquaintance who writes extensions for Writer, the word processing part of the OpenOffice.org suite. A couple years ago, I suggested an extension for the one thing that's missing from the major word processors: a Find toolbar. When I'm revising, especially when I'm making changes from marked-up hard copy, it annoys me to have to open a dialog box to search for a particular place in my text. That always means opening a little window that covers part of the text, so you always have to open and close it as you go through your documents. So many apps have a Find toolbar. Why do all the word processors lack such an obvious user interface improvement. My friend loved the idea, but he never wrote the extension. Probably because this toolbar was in the spec for 3.3.

Microsoft Office 2010 lets you open a Navigation pane with a Find toolbar. This pane sits to the side of the document, where it's out of the way. That's not bad. But you still have to open something separate. That's a minor quibble, though. The new Navigation features are pretty nice.

OpenOffice.org 3.3 puts the Find toolbar right where I want it, on the toolbar at the top of the document window. Because OpenOffice.org allows you to customize your toolbars in ways that Word users can only dream of (I admit it--I love to customize my workspace so it works the way I like, and the tools I use are handy while those I don't use are out of the way or are out of sight completely), I can (theoretically--I haven't actually done it yet, since I just installed 3.3 today) move the new Find toolbar to a convenient location.

I've been using MS Office 2010 more lately, although I really prefer OpenOffice.org. I was able to buy Office through a program at work for a staggering $10, which pretty much negates OpenOffice.org's most obvious benefit: it's free. (Maybe I'll write about why I prefer OpenOffice.org to Word in a future post. Hint: It has nothing--OK, little--to do with the price and everything to do with functionality.) I think Office 2010's new collaboration and online features are interesting and compelling, although I haven't actually needed to use them yet. But this Find toolbar, even if it seems to be a little thing, is a huge deal to me. It's something I cry for every time I make changes from my crit group. This alone will encourage me to use OpenOffice.org more.

Or it would, if not for the new kid on the block.

LibreOffice 3.3 is a new fork of OpenOffice.org, released this week. Its reason for existence is a long story, probably of little interest to most readers of this blog. In short, it was started when Oracle bought Sun, who "owned" and was the main supporter of the open-source OpenOffice.org project. Based on Oracle's history of not supporting open-source projects all that well, a whole mess o' key OpenOffice.org developers jumped ship and started a new project based on the older program. You can do that with open source.

You won't notice a lot of difference between OpenOffice.org 3.3 and LibreOffice 3.3. They are built on the same code base, although LibreOffice has supposedly cleaned up the source code considerably to improve efficiency, added a handful of unique features, and made some slight differences in the interface. However, because LibreOffice is no longer tied to OpenOffice.org or Oracle, and because many of the top engineers from the older program are working on the new guy now, it's worth watching. LibreOffice (a name that could change in the future) will probably change faster and more dramatically than its mother application. New generations are like that: rebellious, inventive, and a bit iconoclastic. One of my favorite changes in LibreOffice is the streamlined installation that gets rid of--finally--OpenOffice.org's annoying request to register after you install. Why should you need to register an open-source application? I also love that LibreOffice automatically pulled in my OpenOffice.org templates and macros.

And, of course, LibreOffice also has my Find toolbar, a wonderful early Valentine's Day gift.

Writer Zen: We Are Our Own Protagonists

by Deren Hansen

As the protagonist approaches the climax of our novel, we pull out all the stops, throw ever thing at them, and turn what was a difficult situation into an impossible one. It's a good thing real life isn't like that-- except sometimes it is.

I spent most of yesterday expecting to find time to write up a note to post here, but there was always one more thing that required my attention. I resolutely fought through the legions of time-sucking details until I managed to clear some time in the evening. I signed on ready to write when, like drawbridge raising just before gaining the castle, I was met with a maintenance notice. I could almost hear the antagonist, doomed damsel in his clutches, on the battlements above cackling at my plight.

I hope that doesn't sound overly dramatic, but it gave me cause to consider the ways in which writing a novel is like the journey of the hero in our stories. We undertake the project confident we're up to the task of embodying our vision. There are set-backs along the way, with which we deal. And at least once during the project there comes a time that things look very dark and the prospect of finishing seems impossibly remote.

Mount Doom (Wikipedia)

With my own projects, I've often felt a real kinship with Frodo marching across the plains of Mordor: the end is plainly in sight yet it feels as though neither of us is ever going to get to the end. The analogy seems particularly strong when I have only a few chapters left to write--I know exactly where they're going and they're chock full of exciting stuff--but Heaven and Hell seem to be conspiring to use up my every waking moment.

I recognize those situations as the time for renewed resolve. And I console myself with the thought that the degree of opposition I feel must be a sign that I'm producing something really good.

But what it really comes down to--what sets us apart as novelists--is that, like our protagonists, we doggedly push through to the end.


Deren blogs daily at The Laws of Making.
Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

KISS

No, not the band. I honestly don't know if I could name one of their songs. (Makes me sound young, I know.) I'm using the KISS acronym here. Keep It Simple Stupid.

What can I possibly be referring to in reference to writing? A few months ago, I finally finished Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. I thought it was wonderfully written. I honestly praise Brandon for his smooth writing ability. However, there was one part in the entire book that I sat there thinking, "Really Brandon, it takes three pages to explain how he goes from one part of the city to another?"

Not to pick on Brandon (Seriously, he's published and I'm not), but my point with this is I got the idea of what was going on in a few paragraphs. I felt like I got the effect after the first page. I understood what he was attempting to do. He was showing us how cool this power is, just how powerful his main character was. I, however, was wondering why it takes this very powerful man three pages to simply cross the town.

Unfortunately, there's a thing about this word 'simple.' What I mean by that is, you do get to expound on it. Showing with your writing means that you're expanding the simple. The simplest thing would be to tell: "And he used magic to cross the city." But I think if you take pages to show us what everyone did during dinner, you may have a problem. However, if dinner is an important event: an argument, a discovery, or something else crucial, then it can take longer. But if nothing important to the story is happening, do what you can to show, but don't go into overdrawn description.

I love description. I'm guilty of being long-winded. During LDStorymakers' Boot Camp in April last year, the first thing that one of my group members said about my book was "Info dump". Yeah, wanted to give up writing and cry. (And then one of the other members of the boot camp group goes on to win awards for her writing. Thanks a lot Julie!) :) My point, however, is that you want to be careful. Keep things simple. Expound what's important. Shorten what isn't. Keep your strategy simple....stupid.

Alien abductions are involuntary, but probings are scheduled.

Characters and Cliche

By Julie Daines

Dear Cliche,
We are always taught to avoid you. But, isn't there a way for you to be useful?
Sincerely,
Troubled Writer

Dear Troubled Writer,
Why, yes. There is.  Let me explain:

I can be very useful when you use me in the form of Stereotypes.  You want to develop characters with depth.  I can help you get started.

Look at your cast of characters.  Assign them each a stereotypical trait.

Harry: Reserved
Ron: Funny
Hermione: Bookish

Then take those stereotypes and dig deep until you unearth a whole world of complex traits that grow and take shape throughout the story.

Harry: Reserved, self-doubting but with quiet determination, resourceful, temperamental, brave.
Ron: Funny, coward, complainer, envious of other's accomplishments, loyal friend.
Hermione: Bookish, smart, condescending, sure of herself, opinionated, honest, responsible.

And the list could go on.  But if you, dear writer, can find a starting place for your characters in the world of cliche, you can grow them into something individual, dynamic, and unforgettable.  Work with them and mold them until you know the secret desires of their hearts--and what they do when no one is looking.

Good Luck.
Love,
Cliche.

Your Characters’ Characters

I was reading a first person book the other day. It was rather good and made me laugh when I came across a typo over halfway through where someone referred to the main character as ‘she’ instead of ‘he.’ When they said that repeatedly I realized that it had never particularly said ‘he’ before. I’d imagined the first scene as a boy and stuck with it to the point where I figured they’d actually said something about him being male.

Well with that new realization I read it again changing my mind images around a bit—the romantic hints finally made sense!

The experience reminded me of when my sister freaked out because she didn’t want a specific character in my book to betray the others when I told her that he did. After finishing the book she told me that she wouldn’t have cared if I hadn’t told her how cool he was earlier because the book didn’t portray him as in my description to her earlier.

Getting to the point finally; make sure your characters’ characters get into the book--including their gender and general age.

We hear it over and over again; don’t have your character say something s/he wouldn’t say just to have something said. Find a way for your characters to get there without violating themselves.

Kill Your Darlings

by Scott Rhoades

There's quite a lot of disagreement over who first suggested that writers will improve their work if they'll "kill their darlings," but whoever said it was right and many of us hate him or her for it. This doesn't mean kill off your characters. It means look for your favorite bits of writing in a story and delete them.

How often have you been excited to take a favorite chapter, or even a favorite passage, to your writing group or to show it to friends, only to have it ripped to shreds, not because it's poor writing but because it's too good, so good that it stands out from the rest of the work like a sore thumb, calls attention to itself, and just doesn't fit?

Chances are it's a passage where you "create a more realistic setting" by showing how much research you did. Or maybe it's a brilliantly detailed description. Perhaps you got so into an idea that you created a long, brilliant scene, written perfectly, that does nothing for your characters or plot, even if it is tremendously fun to read.

When you edit, look for those places where a phrase or word or scene stands out, one that makes you feel proud and maybe even a little brilliant because it sprang out of your head. Then delete it or tone it down. It will hurt, but in the long run it will be for the best.

Sounds easy enough, but it's not. Chances are good you won't be able to spot these bits in your own writing, even if you're good and finding them in other people's work. And if you do find them yourself, you'll probably feel good about them and leave them in because you really like them. They are your darlings, after all.

This is reason number 873 why it's important to be part of a good writing group. They'll point out your darlings, and then you'll go home from the group disappointed and a little bitter, probably feeling like they would have liked it better if they were bright enough to get it. And then you'll remember that you're part of that group because they are smart enough to get it and, as much as it stings, you'll consider what they said and, more often than not, you'll reluctantly realize they might possibly have been right.

Don't actually kill your darlings, though. Nobody wants to get rid of such brilliant writing. Cut them and paste them into another file, where you can save them and put them back in after you've tried the story without them for a while. You'll rarely ever actually put them back in, though. Once you've lived with the story after killing those poor darlings, you'll most likely discover that the story is better without them.

Killing your darlings hurts. It might be the hardest thing about revising. Often, those darlings really are your most creative, artistic writing. But they stand out and distract the reader, and they have to go.

You'll miss them. Terribly. But nobody else will. Grieve for them. Cry for them. But get rid of them.

"The Economics of Book Covers" from the Freakonomics blog

This was an interesting article on book covers from Freakonomics. I thought I'd share the link with you.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/the-economics-of-book-covers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+FreakonomicsBlog+(Freakonomics+Blog)

Time. It's Priceless.

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you." ~ Carl Sandburg ~

Time.
It's what we complain about lacking no matter where we are in life or what we are doing.
Time.
It doesn't matter that every single person has 24 hours in a day.  Yours is much shorter than mine, right?
What can we do about making time for writing?
Did you catch that?
I wrote "making time" not "finding time." There is a difference.
Writing is a choice.
Sometimes it's easier to choose to read and answer emails. Or check on my friends on Facebook. Or watch Castle.
Those are all good choices, come on!
But I really, really want to finish my WIP. How about you?

Here's a few ideas to help you make time for writing:
Choose writing-Need I say more?
Find the best time of day-When are you more productive? 5:30 AM? Midnight? For me it's after the kids go to school. The house is quiet, my tummy is full and I'm ready to write.
Write during your best time of day-Stay focused! Write. Edit. Whatever you're doing for your writing, stay in the zone.
Turn off the Internet, turn off your phone, turn off your email-For me I have to turn off my little email icon. It loves to remind me of all the cool people who like me and write to me.
Reward yourself-After you've accomplished your writing goal for the day you'll feel exhilarated. That's reward enough! I like to reward myself with turning my email back on and eating some chocolate.

Do you have any tips on making time for writing?

A Minimal Speech Tag Framework

by Deren Hansen

Writing Wednesday

In ideal prose, the dialog is so distinct that the reader knows the identity of the speaker without any additional attribution.

In practice, the ideal is rarely achieved and dialog requires attribution.

A Minimal Speech Tag Framework

Cardinal Rule: The reader must never be confused about who is speaking.

Strategy: Employ a consistent pattern of attribution so that your readers eyes slide right past the tags.

Attribution Rules

1. Use said and asked almost all the time. An alternate tag might occasionally be warranted, but you'd better have a very good reason.
2. Use the form "Fred said", not "said Fred." "Said" comes last in the prepositional form ("said he" sounds archaic). There's no reason not to be consistent (aside from the long fashion of using the said-first form).
3. Only apply adverbs to "said" that qualify the physical act of speaking. Using adverbs to convey something about the emotional state of the speaker is lazy writing. You're telling the reader something about the way the character spoke if you say "said loudly" (and more direct verbs like shouted or cried aren't appropriate).
4. Use associated beats to convey non-verbal communication and show the emotion state of the speaker. A beat is a sentence in the same paragraph as the dialog that describes what the speaker is doing or feeling.
5. Omit speech tags when it's clear who is speaking. Use tags or beats to identify the speakers periodically so that the reader doesn't lose track of speaker order.
6. Use speech tags whenever speaker order changes. In general, you are only able to omit speech tags when two characters speak in alternating lines.

What do you think? Does this framework help answer your speech tag questions?


Deren blogs daily at The Laws of Making.
Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Writing is Hard Work

by Deren Hansen

Writing Wednesday

Someone, perhaps one of the agents whose blogs I follow, observed that, "Many people who say they want to write really mean that they want to have written." That is, many people aspire to be writers because they would like to be in the position of receiving the attention paid to someone who has published a book.

Writing is hard work. Rachelle Gardner commented on this a few months ago in a post entitled, "Is Writing Fun?" She said,

"Personally, I don’t enjoy the process of writing, but I do enjoy the results of what I write. However, I know many of my clients, fiction authors especially, love their writing time. For them, that creative flow is energizing. They love being in their made-up worlds and hanging out with their fictional characters and find it an enjoyable “escape” from the hard work of real life."

She went on to explain,

"But if you decide you really want to go for it, then you’ll be ready to accept and deal with the truth: Writing a novel is hard work. You’ll be able to commit to the work, hoping eventually there’ll be a payoff meaning that you’ll enjoy the results of your labor. That doesn’t necessarily mean being published, but simply enjoying your story on the page, and enjoying the feeling of accomplishment. In that way, it can still be a labor of love even if it’s hard work.

"Let’s keep in mind that the ultimate “labor of love,” giving birth, is not in the least enjoyable and in fact involves great pain. It’s the result that makes it a labor of love. Sorry, I know you’re a guy and all, but this is a good analogy. In fact, one of the things that defines a “labor of love” is the fact that a task can be extremely difficult and unpleasant, but the results are so “worth it” that you do it anyway. I don’t think “labor of love” means something is supposed to be fun."

There's an important difference between satisfying hard work and a joyless chore. Some people say that you write because you have to; that you shouldn't write for a living if you can do anything else. I think those sentiments are shorthand for the fact that writing is hard work--the kind of hard work that not many people find satisfying. If you find writing to be a joyless chore, that's a good sign that you should do something else.


Deren blogs daily at The Laws of Making.
Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Never Name Emotions

By: Julie Daines

How many times have we heard, “Show don’t tell”? So many times that it goes in one ear and out the other? So often that we’ve stopped considering what that really means?

Here’s one quick and easy way to spot telling: Any time you use the name of an emotion to describe the emotion, it’s usually telling.

Examples of telling:

Anger burned inside me.

Relief flooded through her. (Any time an emotion moves through a character’s body, it’s telling.)

A melancholy sadness filled Amy’s soul like the last song of the whippoorwill. (Definitely better than the first two, but still telling.)

“I hate you,” John said angrily. (Avoid ly words--because it's telling!)

The goal instead, is to SHOW us how those emotions feel, what they look like, what they sound like…

So, when you find yourself writing the name of an emotion, ask yourself, Can I show this in a better way?

Let’s try again:

If he smirked at me one more time, he'd be going to the dance with a black eye.

She leaned back in her chair, her shoulders finally relaxing.

Amy sat on the back porch resting her chin on her knees. The last song of the whippoorwill carried across the frosty fields, empty now that the harvest was over. …

“I hate you!” John turned and slammed the door. Jane cringed with every footstep as he stomped down the stairs.

Take home lesson: Do not use the name of an emotion to describe an emotion.

The Two Most Powerful Words

By Cheryl C. Malandrinos 

For a character driven writer—and reader—like me, a story idea begins with a character. I think about this character. I figure out where he or she lives, how the character dresses, what his or her daily life is like, what motivates this person, and consider his or her physical description.

None of that, however, gives me a story. A storyline involves plot, climax, and resolution. It involves conflict: something that the character needs or wants and the obstacles that stand in the way of him getting it. 

This is where the two most powerful words come into play. What? You’ve never heard of these words? I think you have.

Those two words are, “What if?”

Take Amelia, she is an impulsive girl born into a wealthy family. Her curly hair is blonde and her eyes blue. At the age of 13, she lives in Pennsylvania where her father is an important businessman. Tea parties and private schooling fill her days. Since she lives in the mid-1800’s, she wears fine dresses made of silk and fashionable boots with buttons. She has a collection of porcelain dolls, but there is one that is very special to her.

She could be any well-bred girl living in the 1800’s—but she’s not. Amelia has a story all her own.

What if…

Amelia experiences a tragedy unlike she’s ever known?

What if…

Her parents die of the influenza and Amelia is sent to live with her spinster aunt at the Ridgemont estate in Massachusetts?

What if…

Amelia’s impulsive nature is at odds with her Aunt Martha’s desire to bring her up properly? 

What if…

A lonely Amelia befriends Ralph, the Negro stable hand working at the Ridgemont estate? And…

What if…

Aunt Martha disapproves?

What if…

Amelia’s father told her stories of what Aunt Martha was like as a girl and they are very different from the stern, bitter aunt who is now her guardian?

What if…

Amelia decides she must uncover the secret that caused the change in Aunt Martha? And…

What if…

She is willing to risk her aunt’s wrath to find out?

Two little words, yet they open up a world of possibilities. Use them wisely. Use them often. 

Bio: Cheryl Malandrinos is a freelance writer and editor. A founding member of Musing Our Children, Ms. Malandrinos is also Editor in Chief of the group’s quarterly newsletter, Pages & Pens.   

Cheryl is a Tour Coordinator for Pump Up Your Book, a book reviewer, and blogger. Little Shepherd is her first children’s book. Ms. Malandrinos lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and two young daughters. She also has a son who is married.

You can visit Cheryl online at http://ccmalandrinos.com or the Little Shepherd blog at http://littleshepherdchildrensbook.blogspot.com/.  

In addition, you can listen to BlogTalk Radio’s Robin Falls Kids show: Stories for Children  with hosts VS Grenier, D.M. Cunningham and Tiffany Strelitz Haber who chatted with Cheryl Malandrions about her book, writing, the publishing industry, and her experiences with virtual tours on January 3rd. You can listen on demand at the RRRadio’s site http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rrradio/2011/01/03/rfk-stories-for-children.

To learn more about Cheryl Malandrions visit http://storiesforchildrenpublishing.com/CherylMalandrinos.aspx

Cheryl Malandrinos's next stop is January 10th at One Zillion Books http://www.onezillionbooks.com.

Avoiding Unnecessary Detail, Twain-Style

by Scott Rhoades

I decided to dust off my 1899 edition of Mark Twain's The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches, one of two Twain novels that I don't think I've ever read. It starts with a short little thing that I have read before, but it's a good reminder to all authors. It reminds me somewhat of Steinbeck's "Hooptedoodle" prologue to Sweet Thursday, about not overdoing the deatails that get in the way of a story, only, of course, Twain beat Steinbeck by several decades. So, here it is, for your enjoyment and edification.

THE WEATHER IN THIS BOOK

No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood.

Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author's progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.

Of course weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience. That is conceded. But it ought to be put where it will not be in the way; where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative. And it ought to be the ablest weather that can be had, not ignorant, poor-quality, amateur weather. Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article of it. The present author can do only a few trifling ordinary kinds of weather, and he cannot do those very good. So it has seemed wisest to borrow such weather as is necessary for the book from qualified and recognized experts--giving credit, of course. This weather will be found over in the back part of the book, out of the way. See Appendix. The reader is requested to turn over and help himself from time to time as he goes along.

How Well Do you Know Children's Book Covers?

Here is a fun challenge!

Can you name the popular children's books by a portion of their covers?

Take the test then come back and tell me how many you got right. 
Which cover was hardiest to identify?
I only got 10 out of 20. I bet you can beat me!