Great Nuggets of Writing Advice

Maria Schneider of Editor Unleashed celebrates the one-year anniversary of her blog by sharing some great nuggets of writing wisdom collected from authors, agents, and editors.

What writing advice do you have?

“Never give up, no never means no. Keep writing. As my mentor Howard Fast (author of Spartacus and 80 other novels) used to tell me when I’d say I had writer’s block: “‘Plumbers don’t get plumbers block. A page a day is a book a year.’” -Susan Sharpiro

“In many cases, authors understand the market for their book better than the publisher and can do a better job of reaching that audience. But they first need to understand that it’s now part of their job to do that, and they need to embrace it. Marketing can be fun!” -Michael Bourret

“Be generous. Spread ideas. Give things away. Write, share and repeat.” -Seth Godin

“I love real life. I love finding and telling stories, with the deep hope that it will somehow change the reader. Fiction can do that too, of course, but I have always wanted to find real stories and draw people to them, reveal something of life to them that they might not otherwise have a chance to see.” -Susan Orlean

“If you are clever, you’ll share the information that’s important to the audience, and not necessarily the contents of your book.” -Chris Brogan

“When it’s time to think of a new book idea, sitting in front of my computer and trying to squeeze something out just doesn’t work for me. But, when I’m running or on the bus or supposed to be writing something else, that’s when the characters come to me and the plots form. I try to just let myself be open to the flow and carry a pen with me.”-Julie Kraut

“If you’re a writer, then blogging should be a no-brainer for you. Read all the available resources on how to have a successful blog, then get going. Target your blog toward the exact audience you’re writing your books for.” -Rachelle Gardner

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Can We Trust Our Emotions?

Sage advice here from Dr. Gary Chapman.  I believe emotions are a perceptual faculty that give us glimpses of reality that we probably don’t perceive in other ways.

Why do we consider our emotions as an enemy?  One reason is that we know our feelings change.  The lift us up and they let us down.  Our highs don’t last, and our lows are painful.  We conclude, therefore, that emotions are unreliable.  Perhaps the chief reason is that negative emotions don’t seem to fit with our idea of being a “good Christian.”

Anger, fear, disappointment, loneliness, frustration, depression, and sorrow don’t fit the stereotype of successful Christian living.  The fact is negative and positive emotions are morally neutral.  It is what we do in response to our emotions that leads to good or bad.  Negative emotions call for positive action.  Positive emotions call us to celebrate.  Take time to listen to your emotions.

Have you ever done a Bible study on emotions?  When I wrote The Marriage You’ve Always Wanted Bible Study, I felt it important to include a chapter on “Becoming Friends with My Feelings” because I think many Christians have a distorted view of emotions.  Many people are surprised to discover that Jesus felt depression.  Read it for yourself in Matthew 26:36-46.

We have wrongly concluded that negative emotions are from Satan.  The Scriptures teach that emotions are a gift from God.

They motivate us to take constructive action.  Anger motivated Jesus to clear the temple of robbers and thieves.  Emotions call us to engage the mind and to make wise decisions on what needs to be done.  When we make wise decisions, emotions have served their purpose.

Would it surprise you if I told you that Jesus experienced fear?  Fear is an emotion that pushes us away from a person, place, or thing.  In Matthew 26, Jesus prayed, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”  He saw what was ahead and his emotions pleaded for a different way.  Jesus did what we should do with our fear – express it to God.

The proper response to fear is to run to God.  The Psalmist said, “When I am afraid, I will trust in Thee.”  365 times in the Bible God says, “Fear not, for I am with you.”  Our fear leads us to God and we rest in His strength to protect.  Don’t put yourself down for feeling fear, just run as quickly as you can to the loving arms of God.

A Roadmap to the Writing Process

Writing an essay, paper, report, or even a blog post can be daunting, unless you have a plan in place for organizing your work.  A good plan can act like a map that guides you along each step of the way.  Daily Writing Tips shares 5 valuable guidelines, beginning with . . .

1. Prewriting

Have you ever sat staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank document on your computer screen? You might have skipped the vital first stage of the writing process: prewriting. This covers everything you do before starting your rough draft. As a minimum, prewriting means coming up with an idea!

Ideas and Inspiration

Ideas are all around you. If you want to write but you don’t have any ideas, try:

• Using a writing prompt to get you started.
• Writing about incidents from your daily life, or childhood.
• Keeping a notebook of ideas – jotting down those thoughts that occur throughout the day.
• Creating a vivid character, and then writing about him/her.

See also How to Generate Hundreds of Writing Ideas.

Tip: Once you have an idea, you need to expand on it. Don’t make the mistake of jumping straight into your writing – you’ll end up with a badly structured piece.

Building on Your Idea

These are a couple of popular methods you can use to add flesh to the bones of your idea:

• Free writing: Open a new document or start a new page, and write everything that comes into your head about your chosen topic. Don’t stop to edit, even if you make mistakes.
• Brainstorming: Write the idea or topic in the center of your page. Jot down ideas that arise from it – sub-topics or directions you could take with the article.

Once you’ve done one or both of these, you need to select what’s going into your first draft.

Planning and Structure

Some pieces of writing will require more planning than others. Typically, longer pieces and academic papers need a lot of thought at this stage.

First, decide which ideas you’ll use. During your free writing and brainstorming, you’ll have come up with lots of thoughts. Some belong in this piece of writing: others can be kept for another time.

Then, decide how to order those ideas. Try to have a logical progression. Sometimes, your topic will make this easy: in this article, for instance, it made sense to take each step of the writing process in order. For a short story, try the eight-point story arc.

(Continue to Steps 2 through 5)

Five Questions to Ask about Your Fiction

Great advice here from novelist Charles Baxter on what you should ask yourself about your story.

There are about five questions you can ask yourself about stories, and they’re not foolproof, but they’re useful. One is, what do these characters want? Second is, what are they afraid of? Third is, what’s at stake in this story? Fourth is, what are the consequences of these scenes or these actions? And the last one is, how does the language of this story reflect the world of the story itself?

Now, if a writer is writing a story and looks at you and says, “I don’t know what my characters want; I don’t think they want much of anything,” then the story is in trouble. If you don’t know what’s at stake in the story, it means that nothing stands to be gained or lost in the course of it. Something has to be risked. The characters have to want something or to wish for something. They have to be allowed to stay up past eleven o’clock and to make mistakes. If there’s a flaw that many beginning writers have, it is that their characters don’t risk enough. They are just sitting in chairs having ideas. I had a student a few months ago, when I was in residency at a university, who said, I don’t want my characters to do anything, I just want them to think through the problem of nature vs. culture.

That’s not exactly a story, is it?

That’s what I tried to tell her. But she was determined to write a story about issues. I mean, this is an old thing to say, but if you want to write something about issues, write an essay. That’s what essays are for. If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. But that’s why it’s important to have a sense of what your characters want.

(Via Jane Friedman)

Attending ETS, EPS, and SBL on a Budget

Great advice here by Mark Goodacre at the NT Blog on attending SBL on a budget – which also applies to the ETS/EPS annual meeting.  The most disheartening but ultimately true caveat,

Don’t visit the book exhibit. If you do, you will probably end up buying books. You know you can’t afford them, and you run the risk of weighing down your bags so much that you have to pay extra at the airport for the journey home.

Here are numbers 1 – 3.  Wise words, although he should give grits a second chance. : )

1. Find a cheap flight. This has to begin pretty early, like a month or so ago. It’s a good idea to use an aggregator site like Kayak and to watch the prices daily. I have managed to find a $216 flight from Raleigh to New Orleans after having watched the site for the last few weeks, and I am feeling quite chuffed about it.

2. Room-share. The SBL hotels are all pretty posh and pretty expensive. The only way to stay in one of those hotels and keep the price down is to room-share. Of course you need to have a person or people that you can cope with for several days, but the lucky ones among us will actually enjoy the SBL a great deal more because of the company they keep.

3. Breakfast trough-out. The cost of food is a big problem, and four days of conference-attending can put the strain on your budget. What I suggest is to get to one of those great American breakfast buffets every morning and eat to your heart’s content. Don’t be put off by earnest looking professor types who only visit the buffet once. Keep going for as long as you can. Eat so much that you won’t want lunch. You can then make it through to the evening when you’ll be just peckish enough to enjoy something else.
Birmingham never gave me enough to travel, and so troughing my face at breakfast was my standard survival strategy. The American breakfast buffets are great, though for Brits it can be a little off-putting to see Americans putting their fruit on the same plate as their sausage and bacon, or worse, putting corn syrup on their scrambled egg. So Brits abroad may need to avert their eyes. There is also an unappetizing pastey coloured concoction called “grits”, which is to be avoided.

Why Communication in Marriage is Hard

Dr. Gary Chapman always has good things to say on marriage.

Why is Communication So Hard?

Why does communication  break down after marriage?  Often, the answer lies in emotions.  Before marriage we felt one over-powering emotion – love.  But now, the emotions of hurt, anger, disappointment, and fear often dominate.  These emotions do not encourage us to communicate.  Or, if we communicate it is likely to be critical.

We speak out of our anger and create even more negative feelings.  The key is learning how to share emotions without condemnation.  “I’m feeling hurt and when you have time, I need your help.”  Identifying your feelings and choosing to share them is step one.  Step two is accepting the feelings of your mate and asking, “What can I do to help?”

Why is communication so important in a relationship?  Because we are not mind readers. The apostle Paul recognized this reality when he asked the question, “Who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him?  So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”  The reason we know what God is like is because God has chosen to reveal Himself.  If we listen and reciprocate, we can have a love relationship with God.

Likewise, when we reveal ourselves to another person, and they listen and reciprocate, we can build an intimate relationship with that person.  Communication is to a relationship what breathing is to the body.  Don’t stop talking and don’t stop listening.

Adapted from The Marriage You’ve Always Wanted by Dr. Gary Chapman. To find out more about Dr. Chapman’s resources, visit www.fivelovelanguages.com.

Trimming Your Writing to Make it Better

Maybe a fourth of the editing I do is cutting words, phrases, sentences, and sometimes paragraphs.  As good old Strunk & White says, just as a machine should have no unnecessary parts, so a sentence should have no unnecessary words.  Literary agent and editor Rachelle Gardner provides a nice list of items that are easily trimmed – which usually results in cleaner, stronger, more compelling writing.

→ Adverbs, especially those with “ly” endings. Ask yourself if they’re necessary.
→ Adjectives. Often people use two or three when one or none is better.
→ Gerunds. Words that end in “ing.”
→ Passive voice: Over-use of words like “was,” “were” and “that” indicate your writing may be too passive. Reconstruct in active voice.
→ Passages that are overly descriptive.
→ Passages that describe characters’ thoughts and feelings in too much detail (i.e. long sections of narrative or interior monologue).
→ Passages that tell the reader what they already know.
→ Unnecessary backstory.

The Best Philosophy Textbooks

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Philosophy professor Jeremy Pierce at Parableman shares his experience with finding the best and least expensive philosophy textbooks, and makes some good recommendations.

I’m always trying to keep my students’ textbook prices down. Here are some of the lower-priced books I’ve found. I’d be glad to hear any other suggestions any other philosophy instructors have found helpful.

For the ancient and medieval historical intro class that I’ve taught a number of times, there have been two books that I’ve liked. I had settled into Julia Annas’ Voices of Ancient Philosophy at one point, since it organized the material by topics (which is arguably better suited for an intro class in some ways than working through the material chronologically, which admittedly does have other advantages), and I love a number of her more idiosyncratic choices of texts. Amazon sells it for $52, though, and I still had to provide some medieval sources. The college bookstore always jacks the price up noticeably above list price, too. I’ve used Penguin’s edition of Augustine’s City of God, and I’ve tried a few different Aquinas anthologies, one from Oxford World Classics and the other from Hackett (Aquinas: A Summary of Philosophy). Along the way, I discovered Nicholas Smith’s (et.al.) Ancient Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary, which contains a pretty large amount of material for only $35.

I should say that the best inexpensive texts for historical sources are from Hackett, Penguin, and Oxford World Classics. The two things I look for are readability (at least in intro courses) and whether they include marginal page numbers and such markers, since some of the texts for ancient and medieval sources don’t, and it’s much harder to find a passage if you don’t have those. I’ve looked at Amazon’s preview function to compare translations for a number of these books. Sometimes one translation is much harder to introductory students to grasp.

For early modern texts, I usually use Jonathan Bennett’s online translations. Those are free, and they’re much more readable than anything you can buy. For an advanced history of philosophy class, I might hesitate to use these, although I’d probably do it for a 300-level survey. I don’t hesitate at all with intro courses.

Other books I’ve used include Greg Ganssle’s Thinking About God, which is an excellent introduction to philosophy of religion. It’s the most readable introductory book I’ve ever seen. It’s fun and funny. But it seriously looks at the issues, and while I don’t agree with Ganssle on every point I think he’s especially fair on some pretty controversial questions. (Continue)

Charles Dickens’s Advice to an Aspiring Writer

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Jane Friedman shares some words of wisdom here about the process of becoming a writer, illustrated by a letter written by Charles Dickens.  She’s right, you’ll have to be bad for a while before you become good.

Ira Glass has some of the best advice I’ve ever read for writers, at least in relation to great storytelling. He’s said that you have to be willing to be bad at what you do for a long time until you actually can achieve the vision of perfection you have in your head. He even puts himself out on a limb and offers recordings illuminating how bad he was at radio when he first started.

I was reminded of Ira when my writer-friend Teresa Fleming shared with me the following letter from Charles Dickens, where he responds to an aspiring writer.

Tuesday, Feb. 5th, 1867.
DEAR SIR,

I have looked at the larger half of the first volume of your novel, and have pursued the more difficult points of the story through the other two volumes.

You will, of course, receive my opinion as that of an individual writer and student of art, who by no means claims to be infallible.

I think you are too ambitious, and that you have not sufficient knowledge of life or character to venture on so comprehensive an attempt. Evidences of inexperience in every way, and of your power being far below the situations that you imagine, present themselves to me in almost every page I have read. It would greatly surprise me if you found a publisher for this story, on trying your fortune in that line, or derived anything from it but weariness and bitterness of spirit.

On the evidence thus put before me, I cannot even entirely satisfy myself that you have the faculty of authorship latent within you. If you have not, and yet pursue a vocation towards which you have no call, you cannot choose but be a wretched man. Let me counsel you to have the patience to form yourself carefully, and the courage to renounce the endeavour if you cannot establish your case on a very much smaller scale. You see around you every day, how many outlets there are for short pieces of fiction in all kinds. Try if you can achieve any success within these modest limits (I have practised in my time what I preach to you), and in the meantime put your three volumes away.

Faithfully yours.

Yikes, right? (You can read more Dickens letters here.)

Here’s the secret, though: If you’re the writer, do you read this and think: I should just stop trying.

Or do you read this and think: He doesn’t know how wrong he is!

Writers in training know they’re not good, but they know they’re getting better. And they go on to fight another day.

13 Ideas for Stuck Bloggers

There are times when the creative well runs dry.  If you’re experiencing bloggers block, Michael Hyatt (CEO of Thomas Nelson and a prolific blogger) shares 13 helpful tips to get the ball rolling again. 

A few examples:

•  Review a book, movie, or software program. This is a great way to share some of the resources you have found and why you liked them. It can also help your readers avoid products or experiences that were not so helpful. What are some of your favorite resources? Example: “Book Review: Same Kind of Different As Me.”
• Comment on a powerful quote. I can’t read a book without underlining the passages that impress me. Occasionally, I go back and post the quotes that stand alone. Also, from time to time, I post the quote and that comment on why a particular quote was meaningful. Example: “Don’t Wake Up Dead.”
• Report on an interesting conversation. I meets lots of interesting people. Some of them I meet at work; some of them I meet in my social life. Regardless, rarely a week goes by that I am not deeply stimulated by a conversation I have had. Why not blog on that? Example: “Twitter as a Leadership Tool.”
• Provide a step-by-step explanation for how to do something. When you provide five steps to this, or four strategies for that, people gobble it up. I think all of us have a need for down-to-earth, practical help with the items that interest us. Example: “How to Update Your Facebook Status With Twitter.”
• Answer your readers’ questions. My readers ask some of the best questions. Sometimes they email them. Sometimes they put them in the comments of an older posts. Often they just Twitter them to me. I assume that if one person has the question, so do others. By answering these you demonstrate that you are listening. Example: “How Much Times Does Twittering Really Take?”