Month: March 2013

You have a project you love, but have negative time to devote to it. Whenever you manage to scrape a few minutes together to work on it, all you do is stare at the screen. Does this sound like you? If so, I totally want to be friends, because this is me almost every day. As a writer with a day job that takes a lot of creative energy, I’m usually too drained to focus on my personal projects when I get home in the evenings. However, there’s one thing that tends to work…

Write something completely different.

I have no idea why this works, but if you write something completely different–something you don’t intend to polish, something utterly ridiculous–it makes every other kind of writing easier.

Are you stuck as you try to work on a personal writing project today? If so, try writing about a giraffe that got stuck in an office building. By the time you’re done, the giraffe will be the only one who’s stuck.

Happy Writing Wednesday, friends! Today I’d like to talk about writing with emotion. To make a scene powerful, you need to feel it as a writer. But what if you’re writing about something you’ve never experienced? The answer is simple: focus on the emotion. What is the core emotion your character is feeling? Despair? Joy? Loneliness? Peace? Frustration? Bliss? Fear? Love? Something else? Whatever the core emotion is, think of a time you felt that emotion in its rawest state, and draw from that feeling. Your writing will shine with realism, whether you’ve experienced what your character is actually experiencing or simply the same core emotion in a different form.

Happy Writing Wednesday, friends! Today, let’s talk about characters. What makes your characters unique and interesting? I don’t know about you, but I’m not normal, and I think normal is boring. What could you do to make your characters abnormal, but still true to life? What abnormal quality, interest, or history could you use to shape your character and your story? Take a look at your characters in a recent piece of writing, and see if you can add some depth and interest to those characters to make them stand out. After all, normal is a dryer setting. 😉