The Prompt
Work the words vermillion and musky somewhere in the next 250 words you write.
[Guest Prompt] Therese Walsh – Magnetic Words
THERESE WALSH is the author of The Moon Sisters and the cofounder of Writer Unboxed. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and two children.
The Prompt
Imagine your protagonist has just opened a large magnetic poetry kit. Which words call to him/her? Will s/he put these words on the refrigerator in a random scattering or compose a sentence? Share your words and sentences here.
Tips
- If you don’t have a magnetic poetry set (what?!) you can play online
- You can write a whole story based on the words you select or you can show the scene where they select words.
GO!
[Tuesday Reading Room] “A Telephone Call” by Dorothy Parker
A guest post by regular contributor Jami who is reading a story a day throughout 2012.. This week: “A Telephone Call” by Dorothy Parker.
This week’s post is a guest post by regular contributor Jami
who is reading a story a day throughout 2012 over at Worth The Effort. This week: “A Telephone Call” by Dorothy Parker.
Suffering.
A woman questions God about why a lover hasn’t called her at the time he said he’d call. The pleading and negotiating she does which is clearly inner dialogue is painfully realistic and honest and it exposes the vulnerable side of every woman when she is in the first phase of a relationship.
Will he call?
Should I call him?
What will he think if I call him?
Will he hate me if I call?
How long should I wait for his call?
What happens if he doesn’t call?
Why didn’t he call?
WOW, Dorothy Parker really blew me away with this story. It was made more potent with its brevity and with an ending that leaves the reader counting down the seconds until the woman makes a decision and answers her own questions.
My guess about the ultimate resolution?
She calls.
He doesn’t answer.
Here is a link:
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/teleycal.html
(c)2012 Jami Balkom
The Myth Of The Solitary Writer
Today’s article is a guest post by Kirsten Simmons, host of The Interactive Novel. Thanks, Kirsten!
“The first professional writing job I ever had, after seventeen years of trying, was on a movie called King Kong Lives. I and my partner-at-the-time, Ron Shusett, hammered out the screenplay for Dino De Laurentiis. We were certain it was going to be a blockbuster. We invited everyone we knew to the premiere; we even rented out the joint next door for a post-triumph blowout.Nobody showed. There was only one guy in line beside our guests, and he was muttering something about spare change. In the theater, our friends endured the movie in mute stupefaction. When the lights came up, they fled like cockroaches into the night.”
~Steven Pressfield, Do The Work
The movie, as Pressfield goes on to describe, was an unqualified disaster. It was roundly panned by the critics and barely registered on the gross lists.
What The…?
How did something which had such promise in the eyes of the authors go so totally wrong?
I’ve never spoken with Pressfield, so I can only guess at the reasons behind the tanking of King Kong Lives. But if I were to guess, I’d say it has something to do with community.
We tend to believe that writers work in seclusion. Think of the stereotypical writer pounding away at the keyboard all by his lonesome. This is especially true when there’s money attached to the work. The people paying us don’t want too many people to know the story, after all, otherwise who would buy it down the road?
But this brings up some problems, because the worst person to judge a piece of writing is the author. We’re far to close to our work. When I’m trying to edit anything I’ve written, I either think it’s brilliant or I see flaws that don’t exist. In my earliest writing days, I ruined dozens of perfectly good stories by tearing them apart to fix perceived flaws in the ideas. (My mechanics, on the other hand, were rarely the target of my edits, despite needing a fair amount of help.)
Fixing The Problem
What’s changed since then? I found a community.
All writers need people they can turn to for additional opinions when they run into problems. Outside eyes can offer a fresh perspective and are much more likely to identify the problems in our work. Communities like this one are essential to achieving a finely tuned, structurally sound story.
When you find your community, love them and hold them tight. Thank them profusely for their input (even if it’s not what you want to hear) and offer at least as many insights as you receive. Every amazing writer has a strong community behind them. We are nothing without our people.
Kirsten is a student, entrepreneur and author taking the idea of community to a whole new level. The Interactive Novel, about a girl who disappears without human touch, is evolving entirely in public with audience feedback. Come check it out!
Don’t Write! How ‘Not Writing’ Could Save Your Story
It can be a struggle to find time to write, and yet here I am, bringing you a post on fitness? What’s up with that?
Well, the facts speak for themselves: making time for fitness is like an investment in ourselves that pays us back in increased concentration, productivity and creativity.
Today I’ve asked Lisa Johnson from LisaJohnsonFitness to give us some pointers about how to integrate exercise and creativity without derailing our writing schedules.
I particularly like her 10-minute burst idea – check it out below.
Also, Lisa has offered to answer any questions you might have about integrating fitness into your routine. (Normally she charges people handsomely for the privilege!) Just post your questions below.
Thanks Lisa!
How ‘Not Writing’ Could Be The Best Thing You Ever Did For Your Writing Career
Hunched over our laptops, tapping away on the keyboard, writers feel like we have to be writing to be productive.
But, to get those creative juices flowing, maybe what we really need is to push away from the desk, slap on those sneakers and head outside.
Taking a break to get your body moving will:
- Decrease stress
- Increase productivity
- Improve time management
- Improve mental sharpness
- Boost creativity
The 30 minutes that you spend in motion will be more than made up for through increased creativity and output. I promise. )
So pick an activity that you enjoy. It doesn’t have to be a prescribed fitness routine with weights, reps, and sets at the gym. It doesn’t have to be the “Om” of a yoga class, but it can be if that’s what you like to do. Some options to consider:
- Just go for a walk; nature helps us calm down and declutter our brains.
- If you’ve got the cardio endurance, go for a run.
- Take a yoga or Pilates class for weight-bearing strength work and a little Zen.
- If you like group exercise classes or watching TV while you do cardio, go get a gym membership.
- Buy some free weights for your home (cuts out all travel time).
- Watch fitness DVDs; stream them on your computer or use your local cable company for free routines.
Also, if the idea of being away from your writing for an hour just seems completely unfathomable, you can always break workouts down into 10-minute bursts. I tell this to clients regularly. When you’re transitioning from one task to another, do a quick 10-minute burst of cardio. This can be as simple as running in place or skipping rope or throwing on some tunes and dancing around your living room. The brain break will give you a clean slate as you start your next task. It’s amazing how well this works.
If you’re looking for overall guidelines, you want to do a minimum of 150 minutes of cardio per week; anything above that is gravy. Your heart will thank you, your doctor will thank you, and your readers will thank you!
If you have any questions, just ask below, and I’ll answer them.
Cheers,
Lisa
Lisa Johnson has been a certified personal trainer and Pilates instructor since 1997. She owns Modern Pilates in Brookline, MA and has been a fitness blogger for three years at Lisa Johnson Fitness.com. She also blogs for FitStudio.com (a Sears company.)
http://lisajohnsonfitness.com
http://modernpilatesboston.com
An Accountability Buddy: The Productive Writer’s Secret Weapon
Today’s guest post from Melissa Dinwiddie is a wonderful primer on how to use the StoryADay community to help you become more productive than you ever dreamed. Thanks, Melissa!
Do you know one of the most effective things you can do to get your writing done?
Make yourself accountable.
I don’t know the statistics, but it’s a well known fact that if you want to reach a goal, speaking your commitment — including your deadline — to someone you know will hold you to it makes you dramatically more likely to actually do it.
Accountability is a powerful tool, and there are a number of ways you can integrate it into your writing practice. One of my own secret weapons is an accountability buddy.
Here’s what I’ve learned about maintaining an effective accountability partnership.
At the start of the year I was in a mastermind group (another great accountability tool), assembled with the express purpose of helping each other accomplish one specific goal in the month of January. When that group dissolved, a couple of us decided to keep checking in with each other.
At first our monthly calls started to get a little chatty — understandable enough, since we liked each other and had come to think of each other as friends.
This is an inherent danger in any accountability relationship. The problem, of course, is that chatting does not make for finished projects and completed goals.
Accountability partners have to be vigilant, and must keep coming back to the purpose for their partnership. If you want to chat, set up another date specifically for that. During your accountability check-ins, stick with the agenda: keeping each other on track.
This is exactly what I did at the end of a particularly chatty call. “Before we hang up,” I asked, “what’s your next step?”
My buddy confessed that she had a novel that had been sitting in a drawer for way too long, and what she really wanted was to get it edited and up for sale as a download on her site.
“Aha,” I responded, kicking into coaching mode, “so what’s stopping you?”
I asked her realistically how long she thought the editing would take, and when she said “about four hours,” I suggested (okay, I practically insisted) that she do it this week. In other words, I held out an expectation that I thought was achievable.
With my kick in the butt, she was ready to take on this project that she’d been putting off, so the next step was to set up a check-in schedule that worked for her. She committed to emailing me a progress report every night before going to bed, and set a goal of a 2-3 chapters per day.
Although it turned out four hours was an underestimation, I’m pleased to report that in less than two weeks my buddy had finished editing her entire manuscript and was ready to tackle the production side of getting her novel made into a downloadable ebook format. She swears she never would have gotten there without my help.
Do you think this kind of partnership might work for you? Give it a try! To keep you on track, I recommend sticking with the same structure every time you meet. The following questions are a good jumping off place:
- What did you achieve since we last checked in? Did you accomplish your goal?
- What didn’t work? What are you going to do differently next time?
- What goal do you commit to between now and the next check-in?
- What can you use help with?
Remember to reserve your chatting for another time, and let me know how it goes!
Artist, Writer and Inspirationalist Melissa Dinwiddie helps creatives (and “wannabe” creatives) to get unstuck, get unpoor, and just plain play bigger. Find her at her blogs, Living A Creative Life and 365 Days of Genius.
Win! Win! Win!
Leave a comment with your best tips for boosting productivity and/or working with other people and win a copy of Rory’s Story Cubes, a wonderful dice game that doubles as a story-telling tool. Roll the dice and make a story from the extremely cute images on the dice.
Today’s winner will be a random draw, so you get extra entries if you post about StoryADay on your blog, Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else (yes, I’ll give credit for blog posts from yesterday). Just leave me a comment saying where you posted.
Special thanks to Rory O’Connor and the lovely folks at Gamewright Games for donating this prize.
