Motivation tip #423

Writers read. Lots, possibly too much.That’s a given.

Sometimes we read crap. As writers, I think we’re tolerant. We can often find some merit in a book, even if it’s the interesting use of a metaphor on page 21. But not all the time. One of the hazards of cracking open the pages of a book is that we’ll never regain the time invested in ploughing through it if it happens to be a stinker.

I was going to say it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but that’s not true. Reading poor writing may feel like that.

I’m going to suggest a procrastination-busting idea.

Start off by recalling the last poorly written book you endured. And for the sake of the exercise, this needs to be fiction published as a physical book by a company. Indie’s ok, but not self pubbed.

If the story you’re thinking of aroused strong passions, such as disgust, it’s not what I want. I’ll argue that if it was able to stir anything, it involved a reasonable standard of writing. If you shrieked at the description of the torture of small puppies, (and stuffed the book through a meat grinder, before burning it and dancing on the ashes), then the author got to you. No author can ask for more.  And it's not the response I'm seeking. 

I’m referring to writing that fails to keep your interest. When you read a few lines and find your eye sliding down, off the page. The sort of book that you only persist with in the belief that something’s going to happen. Eventually. And you give up when it becomes patently obvious it won’t.

Why am I asking you to torture yourself and recall something so mediocre that its only merit was it was a great cure for insomnia? Dont waste the experience! Use it.

Here’s what I’m suggesting.

Stand the book up somewhere prominent in your work-area. (Or a photocopy of the cover if it’s a library book)

Repeat the following: the author had the guts to persist with this nonsense. The author kept going until it was finished. The author had enough faith to not abandon it. An editor loved it enough to believe it was worth taking a risk on and..... publishing. (You remember publishing? That wonderful form of validation that’s been your dream since you were an embryo?)

If that clown can do it, so can I.

Because nothing gets published without a tonne of effort being put into it. Editors and agents receive a gazillion submissions every millisecond. A work that makes it to the bookshelves has been nurtured and loved and fed and massaged. Hours of patience were invested in it. You’ll never know how many times the author came close to abandoning it, but the evidence is there: it was never abandoned.

When you find the call of twitter/Facebook/ blogs/games/snack when you’re not hungry/tv distracting you when you want to write... stop.

Look at Crappy Book.

And repeat the above.

Great writing is inspirational. Pathetic writing might be depressing, but it has its uses. 

So excuse me, I’ll wade through Chapter 15 of my WIP again, and see what I can change. If it ever gets published, I'd hate its ony use in life to motivate others in that way....

Sprints and marathons

When I was first grappling with the whole concept of writing seriously for publication, I felt I had to be a writing slut. Or as much of a slut as possible when writing Good Clean Fun. Any call for writing for kids, and I was there, putting out my prose, enticing the editors to pick up my manuscript and have their way with it.

I figured short story creds were a quick way to plump up the bio. But... every call for short stories for kids had a limit of 500 words. Damn! How can you arrange 500 words in a manner that tells a satisfying story? 

Horses for courses. I figured I was a middle-distance runner. Five hundred word sprints? Fughedabout it. Fifty thousand word marathons? Uh-huh. My range was between 7 and 20K  - chapter books and earlier MG stories, and that was that. I could see it was limiting my market potential. Some ideas for stories might be more suitable for an older audience, but there was no way I could top 50K. So that was that.

Stupid idea.

But since I was hungry for some publications, my first goal was to tackle the sprint. Forcing myself to squeeze a story to a 500 word limit was one of the best writery things I'd done. It didn't come easy. Firstly, I had to tell a story in a single scene. I learnt this after writing a few 500 word three-act stories. They were the written equivalent of "I'm on a boat - now I'm on a horse" minus the eye candy. They were like a movie shot with a hand-held camera. Jumpy and disjointed  (better analogy). It was unfair on multi-scene narratives to force them into 500 words.

Telling a story within a single scene was actually easier than expected, but these scenes tended to be longer than 500 words, often topping 1000. Solution? Get the writing scythe. And I edited. And cut and pruned.  I made tough decisions about what I actually needed to say. The finished story flowed far more smoothly within its 500 word boundary.  

There have been two rewards.

Firstly, I have produced a total of 5 short stories of less than 500 words, three of which were accepted for publication. The two rejected ones were stories I knew were weaker (perhaps poorly resolved) and even when complete, I knew they weren’t quite right. But I hit the send button in a moment of recklessness.

Nevertheless, I had met my goal and attained some pub creds.

Secondly, my writing is tighter as a result of such discipline. I now write my novels as a series of (up to) 500 word scenes. Sure, it’s an arbitrary number, but it keeps me on my toes. Each makes a contribution to the story. I view them as a single step. Some require considerably less than 500 words to tell their piece, and that’s ok. A few get linked into a chapter – and with more editing, the 5 x 500 word structure gets hidden. And my stories are getting longer.

My next goal is to link more to write a marathon! - I'll letcha know when I'm done.

My Own Secret Story

Early last year, my short story "My Own Secret Dinosaur", was accpeted into an anthology, "Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever". It was a thrilling experience, as it was my first published short.

I write under the pen name of Jo Antareau. For those who know me in "real life", you might see a phonetic similarity between that and my actual name. Not that you can spell it easily, but, hey, I spend half my life spelling my real name, too.


I was totally blown away by the quality of the stories in the anthology, it was humbling to see my tale of a kid trying to keep a baby dinosaur secret included with some really well written and intriguing stories. They are all awesome, but I'm not telling you which one is my fave! Each story has been given a new cover, see below. Mine's kinda cute, yeah?


To promote the antho, the shorts have been released as stand-alone novellas on Amazon, and some will be available FREE. Watch this spot for details

  

And, I get to participate in a blog hop with the other authors, which is fun. Check out my team mates' blogs, below:

http://chrystallathoma.wordpress.com/about/

http://mckoaladays.blogspot.com.au/

http://cornerkick.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/another-free-story.html

http://fallslikesnow.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/my-story-connect-was-published-last.html

http://exxceptiondraft.tumblr.com/post/16784313123/stories-from-the-extinct-doesnt-mean-forever

Reviving a Saggy Plot

Stuck for plot ideas?

Does your story seem a little thin, and you need some action to pump it up? Scrabbling for new ways to torture your MC (and cast) a little more before they reach the satisfying conclusion?  

What you need is..... my plot-twist generator. It’s free to use, and for your convenience, I’ve included it below.

All you need to do is pick a number between 1 and 17, a letter between A and T, and a second number between 1 and 17. Then jam the three together in that order, and look it up. I’ve done the sums, and ended up with a staggering 5440 combinations of possible twists.

You might end up with “The main character impregnates a wealthy relative”. Wow! Your readers never saw that coming! So what if your main character is female and the wealthy relative is 92? Go do a bit of research about IVF technology and stop whining. This is plot gold, I tell ya!

You can pick the same number twice, but the result might end up a little surreal. But that’s ok, if you’re a clever writer you embrace surreal, and follow that route to a plumper, more satisfying read. And the result may not be more convoluted than some books I’ve read lately.

Your otherwise lacklustre period romance might benefit from the introduction of an extraterrestrial to the plot. Or you might need to go back and write in a butler for your struggling farmer family. But, as I’ve said, that’s no hassle to a clever writer like you.

And if you’re really stuck for ideas, repeat the process five times and you’ll come up with a reasonable narrative.

The Plot Twist Generator

Pick two of these: 

1.    The Main character

2.    The antagonist

3.    The main character’s faithful sidekick

4.    The MC’s love interest

5.    The MC’s love rival

6.    The MC’s ex-

7.    The antagonist’s sidekick

8.    The power player (that’s writer talk for a secondary character that has information or power to help or hinder the MC, such as Dumbledore in the HP series)

9.    The illegitimate child

10. The MC’s long-lost father

11. The MC’s mother

12. The MC’s boss

13. A wealthy relative

14. The butler

15. An old gypsy

16. A spy

17. An extraterrestrial

 Pick one of these:

A.   Overhears a secret regarding

B.   rescues

C.   Is discovered with a smoking gun over the dead body of

D.   Fights with

E.   Impregnates

F.    Kills

G.   Contracts an illness from

H.   Kidnaps

I.      Runs over

J.    Has a brief fling with

K.   Finds a stolen item in the possession of

L.    Falls in love with

M.   Misunderstands

N.   gets framed by

O.   reads a letter addressed to

P.   Loses a big bet against

Q.   Gets trapped in a burning building with

R.   Disguises him/her self as

S.   Gets drunk with

T.    blackmails

So, feedback.....

Procrastinating right now!

Anybody wold think I was trying to scare people away from this blog, as it's been a neglected little creature these past few weeks.
No excuses, just procrastination.
And if you want a moral tale about the dangers of procrastination, I shall share.
A few days after Christmas, an item aired on the news. A jokey item about a firestation suffering some fire damage. Not a due to a major blaze, but one that nevertheless caused red faces, and I dont mean from the heat. The fire led to the discovery that the fire station lacked a working smoke detector. You know, those things that fire fighters continually preach about that could save lives?
Ha! Shoemaker's kids go barefoot, psychologist's kids are brats and so on.
Aha, I thought! I could work this anecdote into the blog about practicing what one preaches. You know, especially about silencing the little voices quash the urgency to do it NOW.
Well, I let it go. And now I cant find a reference to it anywhere on the web, so I'm not able to post a nice little link to the item, and I look like I'm not being truthful. Jokey news reports tend to vanish like that, probably aided and abetted by the fire brigade in this case. The story's about three weeks old anyway.
So my anecdote looks lame. Please give me a kick in the commentary section - I need to hear how you guys stop block the voice that says "Ah, do it tomorrow".

Dreaming of a white one?

Christmas comes in the middle of summer here. Some insist on forcing down a roast lunch with all the trimmings, but many are conceding that in hot weather, this is a tad masochistic.

We had a barbecue lunch followed by platters heaped with watermelon, mangoes, cherries and stone fruit. Summer fruit....my idea of heaven, bury me now.

I’ve certainly had hotter Christmas days than today, it reached 30 Celsius (that’s 86 Fahrenheit) in Melbourne. But it was so humid and muggy that, well, lots of rehydration was needed. We were all quite merry, in a sluggish, laid-back way! Even the energy balls kids were lethargic. Or maybe their shenanigans didn’t bother us.

Then at 3:00PM a storm swept through the city. The temperature plummeted and I initially thought drunken revellers were chucking stones. As it turned out, it wasn’t human hands – those cloud-dwelling creatures were. We had hail.

Golf-ball sized chunks of ice bombarded the yard. Some bounced off the neighbour’s roof into our courtyard. As we’d covered the courtyard ground with recycled rubber matting, the hailstones bounced around the small space, some smashing spectacularly against the house wall. It looked like the inside of a popcorn maker. Within minutes, the ground was white. 

The kids’ excitement was short lived as they discovered that getting pelted with ice actually hurt. We stressed over the cat’s whereabouts, but when it was over she sauntered in, her fur completely dry.

But all those dreaming of a white Christmas got one.

Hope you guys got what you wanted, too.

just an observation

The word “hysteria” means “womb” (just think of the word hysterectomy, if you don’t believe me).

Yep, way back when the study of mental health was in its infancy in the last century, it was deemed that such irrational, uncontrolled excessive emotional behaviour was purely feminine. So it was plainly obvious to the learned gentlemen that its origin must be in the uterus.

First coined in the days of Hippocrates, and largely forgotten, Freud repopularised the term and wrote several serious papers about it. Thanks, Sigmund – it obviously wasn’t enough that we were supposed to envy those other things.