Month: January 2013

Happy Motivation Monday, friends! Here’s a site full of motivational quotes for writers. Enjoy!

http://www.writeattitude.net/quotes.php

Finally, it’s Funny Friday again! Hooray! Here’s a writing joke to brighten your afternoon.

There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer.

When asked to define “great,” he said, "I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger!“ 

He now works for Microsoft, writing error messages.

Happy Writing Wednesday, friends! Let’s take a few minutes to talk about senses. Take a look at the first five pages of a recent work, and highlight any descriptions that appeal to the senses: touch, taste, sight, smell, and sound. How many highlights did you make? Were there highlights on each page? If not, where could you add sensory description to make your writing come alive for the reader? The writing journey is tough, but don’t lose your senses! 😉

Happy Motivation Monday, friends! Today, let’s talk about a topic we’re all familiar with–stress. Stress tends to deplete motivation. To stay motivated, we need to manage stress by replacing it with positive thoughts and actions. How has stress impacted your motivation lately?

Take some time to identify the stress in your life. How is your stress affecting you physically and emotionally? I challenge you to take 15 minutes this evening to sit in a quiet room, put on some relaxing music, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing. If any stressful thoughts come to mind, replace them with motivational thoughts. Think about your goals and the feeling of meeting those goals, rather than focusing on the stress of the journey.

Let’s see what results we see in the following week after taking time to clear our minds of stress.

TGIF! I hope you get to unwind this evening with a good book. 🙂

Happy Writing Wednesday, friends! This Monday, I got an incredibly helpful professional critique, and I learned so much from the feedback. Most importantly, I learned how to improve my plot development. I’d like to share my three biggest plot development lessons with you.

1. Line up the plot points in your novel so that all the tension rises together in the climax of the story, rather than creating and resolving conflicts in waves or letting time pass in between critical events. I’m rearranging some events in my story to increase the stress on my main characters, and it creates a much more gripping read.
2. Don’t let the story drag on too long after the climax. The conflict needs a satisfying resolution, but don’t leave your readers wishing the book had ended sooner.
3. Add depth and richness to your main characters. Include meaningful interactions with family members and friends to bring out additional layers in your main characters. Use secondary characters to strengthen your book’s theme while adding tension and providing insight into your main characters.

I hope you’ll benefit from these lessons as much as I have. Best of luck on your writing!

Happy Motivation Monday, friends! It’s a beautiful, albeit chilly, day. I’m finally feeling back to normal, and today I will receive a professional critique of my novel with many helpful suggestions. Now it’s time for me to plan how to implement these changes and set up a regular schedule, most likely using the Pomodoro method.

Whatever your goal may be, I’d like to invite you to join me in the journey toward meeting a goal. What can you do to get there? How can you break it into manageable chunks for each day? What will it mean when you reach your goal? How will your life change? I hope these thoughts will motivate you as much as they motivate me.

It’s a new year with new possibilities, and it’s time to make them reality!

Hooray for Funny Friday! 😀 Here’s a little something to boost your writerly self-esteem.

Happy Writing Wednesday, friends! Today let’s strengthen verbs. A common problem among writers is using weak verbs and adding adverbs. As an exercise, take one pen color and underline all the verbs in the first 3 pages of a current or past project. Then take another pen color and highlight all the adverbs. How many adverbs could you eliminate through stronger, more specific verbs? Strong verbs tighten your writing and create a vivid experience for the reader. Please feel free to comment with examples of strong verbs and the verb-adverb combinations they replaced.

Happy Motivation Monday, friends! Well, I’m still not feeling 100% back to myself after having the flu, and it’s definitely slowing me down. I’m going to keep today’s post short, but I want to make one important point: sometimes the best motivator is knowing when it’s okay to rest. It’s hard to rest when you have a big To Do list making you anxious, but listen to what your body is telling you. Do you need to slow down? Ease back into your routine after time off or illness or both? Take some time during the early part of this week to rest and take care of yourself, and I will do the same. Let’s regroup on Writing Wednesday and talk about goals.