Labor Day is meant to celebrate the contributions we make to our country. Here at Today’s Author, we want to celebrate the contributions we make with our creative efforts. What better day to spend a few minutes, choose a prompt or two (or more) from our archive of Write Now prompts and share your work with the Today’s Author community!
At Today’s Author, our first goal is to get you (and us) to write. Write Now is our own collection of prompts to help you do that. With Write Now we’re not talking about writing, or trying to teach anyone how to write. Write Now is all about putting pen to paper.
It was the dawn of a new era, but not everyone was happy about it.
Important Note: When you post a draft of your work online, it may be difficult to find a publisher who will accept it, as many see an online document as being previously published. It may also be ineligible to be submitted for certain writing competitions. Always check publisher’s and competition guidelines before using a draft you put online.
One of our goals here at Today’s Author is to help all of the writers among us to do what we love to do: write. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by talking to each other and learning from each other. Our Writers Circle series is designed to do just that – provide a chance for us to discuss writing, editing and publishing questions.
This week’s topic is:
A question by a writer friend:
My editor keeps changing my “he said” or “she went” phrases to “they said” and “they went”. He also keeps changing sentences and making them end in a preposition: “The person with whom I spoke” becomes “The person I spoke with.” Is this a universal change in the writing rules we are seeing?
My friend wanted to hear what other writers were experiencing in this regard, so I’m posing it here. What changes in long-held grammar rules have you noticed? Are your editors pushing you toward using the singular “they” instead of gender-specific pronouns? Where do you choose to hold onto the rules we learned in school and where to let go of them?
Let’s discuss this in the comments and see what our community thinks.
There are a lot of words to describe the state of politics in the world today and this morning I’m posting just a random question that came to me while sitting in my local Starbucks: Can we as writers describe the current chaotic state of politics as inspirational?
In other words, I’m curious if other writers in the Today’s Author community have been using the non-stop political news from around the globe as a creative spark for your works in progress, new works or anything creative. Personally, I’ve been working on some ideas related to national and international politics (in a distant future, interplanetary sci-fi sort of area).
Whatever your or my politics might be, we are in a reality right now that on some days reads like fiction. No one’s political views are right or wrong for this particular discussion, I really just want to see if other authors are finding ways to use the current state of things for a creative gain. If you are, how are you using it in your work? If not, is this because you can’t find inspiration in it or is it because you need to get away from the 24-hour noise of it? Looking forward to hearing about how you might or might not incorporate political issues into your works.
Are you participating in National Novel Writing Month this year? I am, I think. I have no idea what, specifically, I am writing, though, but I guess I have a week to figure that out.
I know that not everyone participates in NaNoWriMo or the Young Writer’s Program for writers 17 and under, but I see it as a way to take advantage of a vibrant, energetic and enthusiastic writing community while working on a new (or even an existing) project. You can try new things, new genres or styles for example, and you have a great place to seek help or guidance. I, for one, see it as a very useful program and if you haven’t checked it out, I hope you will.
For me, as I said above, I don’t have any clue what I’m going to write. But I’m thinking I will work on something that is like a serial. Thinking about novels I’ve enjoyed, specifically books by Isaac Asimov, many started as periodic stories in literary magazines before they were brought together as full-length novels. So, my current thought is that I’ll work toward writing an installment or chapter every couple of days. I don’t know if that will work out to a 50,000 word novel in the end or not, but this year my goal is to just write.
How about you? Whether you’re participating or utilizing the NaNoWriMo site or not, what are you writing in the coming month? What goals do you have and what new things are you considering trying?
I haven’t written anything particularly good or creative in a long time. Between work and life, there just hasn’t been a way to focus the time or energy on my writing. This has led me to even question whether or not I can say, even in passing, that I am a writer. I mean, to be a writer, you have to write, don’t you?
I was faced with a challenge these past weeks. I was the best man at a wedding and therefore had to give a speech during the reception to an audience I largely didn’t know (there were about 10 people I had met prior to the day before the wedding). With all the emotions of the wedding, combined with some extra complexities given the nature of our family dynamic, I felt a lot of pressure on this one. How do I put together a speech that is heartfelt and funny and interesting and exactly the right tone, temperament and style for that environment when I had no idea of the audience’s sense of humor, educational or social background or the level of alcohol that would be consumed by that point in time?
Clearly, I’m not the first best man at a wedding or even the first person who has had to write a speech. But this task seemed pretty tough to me at the time. I thought about it for a long time, always coming up blank with how I wanted to proceed. I found myself in the emergency room one day, and since the ER is run like a prison and I couldn’t do anything while I waited for them to decide which needles to stick into me, I pulled out my phone and did some research on the history of the role of the best man in weddings, the history of weddings, the history of speeches…anything I could think of. That led to nothing of substance at the time, seeing as I was constantly interrupted for testing and questioning.
A week or so after I was sprung from the ER, about a week before I needed to give my speech, I still had nothing. S0, I headed to a Starbucks early one morning with a pen and paper, leaving the laptop, the phone and all of their distractions at home. As I sat there staring at the blank page, trying to keep myself from panicking, I thought to myself, “Okay, Rob, what have you done when you’ve had a creative deadline for a story?”
The answer?
I just started writing. I wrote for an hour and a half, just scribbling every word I thought of onto the page as fast as I could make my hand scrawl it out. At that point in time, quality didn’t matter at all, it was all about quantity. The more words and ideas, the better. When I finished, I headed home to type it into my computer and edit it. Which of course meant that I had to figure out how to read it (there’s a reason I type for a living). What I found was that when I fell back to what I’ve always relied on for creative works, I could actually still put together a story. And that’s what it was. I used the research I did in the emergency room to pick a starting point (believe it or not, it was swords and shields). I then wove that together with themes of family and friends, love and happiness and some self-deprecating humor. And finally I pulled the family bits together with the swords and shields to present a toast in which the bride and groom had an army of supporters surrounding them.
The point I’m trying to convey here is that I’m sure we all have stretches where we question whether or not we are “a writer”. I certainly have been questioning that about myself for quite some time. This speech showed me, though, that if you trust your creative instincts, you can fall back on them when you need to do so. Sure, I needed to do some major editing on what I scribbled down on the pages at Starbucks, both for content and for time, but when I finally just trusted myself to write it, the words were there. I gave the speech (without notes!) and afterwards I had people coming up to compliment it. The people who worked in the reception hall came up to me as well and said that they hear three or four of these speeches a week and had never heard a better one than mine. Was my speech really that great? I suspect not. But I think it was not what was expected and that is what made it work. What I did different from the prototypical best man speech is I wove a single story thread throughout and didn’t just go for cheap one-liners and random, embarrassing stories about the groom. That was really the key for me to get the speech written in the first place – I needed to not force myself to write a 4 minute standup comedy routine. They say you have to know your audience, and that’s true, but I’ll add to that concept that it is just as important to know when you don’t know the audience, too. Jokes fall flat if told to the wrong crowd. Personal stories fail if not enough people know the tale. But a well-balanced story can be funny and heartfelt and engaging to a wide variety of people. Having written for so much of my life, I just needed to remember that.
This event helped me see that while I may not have written much in the recent past, I’m still a writer. So I want to know – have you had any experiences that helped you to see that the phrase, “once a writer, always a writer” is a Truth? I’d love to hear your experiences here in the comments!
This is not meant as a scientific poll by any means, but more of a curiosity: do you keep a diary or journal that is just for you? In this era of social media, it seems sometimes that there is no privacy at all. We post often and regularly to Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr (or whatever the latest one is – I can’t keep up!). Many of us post regularly to our blogs, sharing our works of art as well as our opinions and thoughts on the world.
But there are a lot of times when I have things that I need to say, but I need to say them to no one at all. I used to keep a paper diary but that was hard to manage because A) my handwriting is atrocious, B) finding storage for all those notebooks in my tiny, little, crooked house is not easy and C) I would have to take the laptop off my lap in order to put a notebook there…and that’s just not likely to happen.
I used to use my diary as a place to “just write”. Some days it was my deepest, darkest secrets. Some days it was just me waxing poetic about the girl with the beautiful hair who wouldn’t give me the time of day. Some days it was me doodling with a new story idea that magically started to appear on the page as I was waxing poetic about that girl with the beautiful hair. I used to be diligent about it – 30 minutes, every day, no matter what. I’d go back days or weeks later and read what I wrote, often being able to pull a neat little short story out of the debris field of my written mind-dump. While times and life have changed, I’d like to get back to that kind of structure where I write whatever thoughts come to mind without any particular goal or target…though I suspect most of my commentary will be about coffee these days.
Regardless of the potential topics, I’ve tried various online tools to keep my private thoughts and ideas safe and secure, but I’ve never really been happy with them. Private blogs work okay but end up distracting me anyway as I fiddle with the look and feel (even though it’s just for my eyes only). I find online notebooks like evernote to be clumsy and hard to use. I’ve used Microsoft Word documents but they, too, come to a point where I get distracted by fonts and colors and formatting and tables of contents and… you get the picture.
The issue is clearly me more than it is the tools. I have settled on a private blog for now but I’m curious what methods the Today’s Author community might be using for a modern, comfortable, easy-to-use-and-not-too-distracting journal or diary. I’d love to hear your methods for letting the private thoughts out while still keeping them private.
Here at Today’s Author we are have been working to build a community of aspiring writers since December of 2012. We’ve accomplished a lot in the first few years of working toward this goal and we are constantly seeking new ways to improve what we bring to the community.
To continue our growth as a community, we are looking for a few new contributors to write for Today’s Author. Do you feel you are ready to commit to writing a post or two each month, sharing your techniques, strategies, goals, challenges and dreams with respect to writing? If so, please fill out the contact form on the Contact Us page and let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.
We also want to be sure that we are bringing you articles that interest you and fit the topics you want to learn more about. If you have anything you wish we would cover – or cover more often – please leave a comment and let us know!
We hope you enjoy the posts and writing prompts here at Today’s Author. Thank you for being part of our community and remember to just keep writing…
Life is busy for most (dare I say ALL) of us. And now, as November 1 and the beginning of NaNoWriMo loom in front of me, I find myself fretting about whether I should even consider participating in it (even though I know I’m ultimately going to do so). So, as I’ve done now every late October since 2006, I feel it’s time to think about how to squeeze just a little more time out of my day so that I can write.
There are days, weeks and months where I can’t even stand the thought of trying to find an hour or two to put pen to paper. Between the day job and it’s attempts to steal my soul, the kids and their busy social, sports and school schedules, the yard work, the housework and the occasional need to eat and/or sleep, there’s hardly any time left to stop and drink the coffee, let alone do anything else. Every day is a delicate balancing act—a minute-by-minute attempt to do all the things I have to do while also saving some time for the things I want to do.
As a writer, I’ve struggled to find that balance for years now. Partly it is because of the sheer volume of things I’m required to do; partly it’s because of the large number of things I want to do. What this has netted out to for me is a severe lack of writing time because I cannot find ways to prioritize writing over other demands. Yet, I see other authors I admire putting pen to paper and churning out fantastic stories each week, including some terrific works in response to our Write Now prompts. I often wonder how other people have managed to balance their time and put a priority on writing when they have at least as much going on as I do. I’ve tried forcing myself to write when I’m too tired or too stressed to do it willingly, but all this has done is make the writing unenjoyable – just another chore I am angry for having to do – and ultimately it is just as stressful as anything else I might have on my to-do list. I don’t know about anyone else, but when I resent the time I spend writing, the bitterness and anger shows through in the words that get onto the page. While I might use this negativity to my advantage when I am writing performance reviews at work, it is not usually something I want coming through in my fiction.
Thinking about this as I often do, I’ve come to the following conclusions:
I’ve spent a fair bit of time pondering these two seemingly-simple items and I’ve determined that there is nothing I can do to resolve the there-is-not-enough-time-in-the-day conundrum – thus far, I have found no practical, sustainable and environmentally-friendly way to increase the available pool of hours per day beyond the current arbitrary limit of 24. So I’ve set my mind to working on the second item.
To approach this issue, I have started keeping a chart of how I spend my time. As anyone who knows me might expect, I am using Microsoft Excel to keep track of this data because that’s the kind of geek I am. Basically, I’ve been attempting to put together a general list of what I do each day, from the mundane “go to the gym” or “drive The Boy to baseball practice” to the more broad-based “hours spent on the day job”. My goal, of course, is to find a few hours per week to dedicate to writing without taking away even more time from tasks I hate but must do anyway (sleep, for example).
I’ve only been working on this for a few days but what I’ve found already via my pretty charts and graphs is interesting:
Looking at the above items, it is clear why I’m not getting enough writing done – less than one hour per week is not enough time! It would be easy to say “well, just cut the television time and write instead.” But the problem is that I am a daylight-hours kind of person. Once the sun goes down, I am essentially a useless excuse for a human being and it takes an exorbitant amount of effort to do anything that takes thought. I only watch television at night because it takes little-to-no mental activity to do so. The bit that bothers me, though, is the 2 hours I can’t account for – just like when you’re tracking money, anything you can’t account for is bad.
Clearly, this analysis is nothing more than a tiny, first step toward conquering this problem by starting to understand what is going on in my day. My plan of attack is to find those two missing hours and beat them into submission. My second step will be to re-arrange the tasks and order them such that mindless activities, such as dishes and laundry, can be put into the evening hours. Ultimately, I hope to end up with a block of time each day which falls during hours when the sun is still up. That block, I hope, can be devoted to writing.
I am very interested in how other writers find ways to balance their need for sleep, food and family with their need or desire to write. Do you schedule time to write? Do you budget your time like I’m describing? Do you have other tricks or tips?
It’s hard to believe that this morning I tore the page off the calendar as we moved to the first day of October (okay, I realize the phrase “tore the page off the calendar” may say more about my age than I’d like). Didn’t summer just start a few days ago? Yet, here we are, October 1. Leaves are falling, there’s a cool, crisp feeling in the air (at least here in New Jersey) and thoughts are turning to seasonal things like pumpkins, Halloween, raking of leaves and… NaNoWriMo.
Yes, it’s officially the season for National Novel Writing Month preparations! Many writers spend October gearing up for a fast-paced November of writing. Whether it’s for the thrill of creating a new work of fiction in a short amount of time, the camaraderie of participating in a writing event with a couple hundred thousand fellow writers or simply a writing challenge, NaNoWriMo presents aspiring writers with an opportunity to make writing a priority above all the other top priorities we have each day.
Whether you are planning to participate in NaNoWriMo this year or not, the start of a new month, a new calendar quarter and, essentially, a new season of the year is a good time to consider the projects you are working on and what new project(s) you might be considering in the near future. As a “pantser”, I don’t really plan out what my writing projects will include, but I still have generally vague ideas in mind. I’ve participated in and won NaNoWriMo every year since 2006 and am hoping to participate and win again this year. But I understand the concept and rigor of a month of writing isn’t for everyone. So today I am wondering who among our community is planning to participate or at least considering participating in NaNoWriMo, either on the main “adult” site or via the Young Writers Program. Whether you are participating or not, what project(s) are you looking forward to working on over the coming months?
As always, I and everyone here at Today’s Author are happy you have made us a part of your writing journey and hope to continue supporting your creative efforts. If there are ways we can help, please contact us, leave a comment on one of our posts or create a topic in our forums. Keep writing, everyone!
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