Mary from the Andrea Brown agency is running a great contest here:
http://kidlit.com/kidlit-contest/comment-page-1/#comment-2929
hurry to enter because the deadline is today!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
What if I can't write now? :(
Sometimes I am about to go to sleep and sudden inspiration comes to mind. I feel as if I could write out thousands of quality words and be proud of them. The scenes are running in my mind as if I am watching a movie, but darn I can’t write now. It’s so late, and I have to go somewhere important at 6 am tomorrow. So I don’t. Sometimes life gets in the way of our writing and for me it interrupts me at the best times. When I come up with the best ideas, and have the best mood. But we all have priorities. Most of us don’t just write, and I have to say that I am thankful for that but that is another story and another blog post. So as I thought of this post I was thinking of ways that we could stimulate our inspirations at the right time, to get everything that we want done and over. When you sit down at a planned time of day and put your fingers over the keyboard ready to write and completely free, nothing comes to mind. It’s the wrong time. Here is a list of whast I do to stimulate my imagination when I am not really in the mood:
• Listen to music. Preferably music that is accustomed to the scene. Music that will bring out emotions in you.
• Shut off your internet! This should probably be number one. I tend to go on the internet when I am writing and that tends to waste valuable time that could have been productive time. I sound organized don’t I? I am not.
• Just type. Try to imagine the scene rolling by in your mind and type what you see as you watch it, what you sense, and what your characters feel. This really helps me when I want to type out a lot, and it works well because when I visually imagine it and describe it the scene feels more real to the readers.
• Think about how much you love your characters! I mean come on, you can’t keep them waiting. You have to start to torture them through your story, and bring them to endure your authorly evil imagination. But you know that in the end they will turn out just fine, at least you enjoyed the process! JK
• And last but not least nothing! I hope that you guys can add to this list and tell me what you do!
• Listen to music. Preferably music that is accustomed to the scene. Music that will bring out emotions in you.
• Shut off your internet! This should probably be number one. I tend to go on the internet when I am writing and that tends to waste valuable time that could have been productive time. I sound organized don’t I? I am not.
• Just type. Try to imagine the scene rolling by in your mind and type what you see as you watch it, what you sense, and what your characters feel. This really helps me when I want to type out a lot, and it works well because when I visually imagine it and describe it the scene feels more real to the readers.
• Think about how much you love your characters! I mean come on, you can’t keep them waiting. You have to start to torture them through your story, and bring them to endure your authorly evil imagination. But you know that in the end they will turn out just fine, at least you enjoyed the process! JK
• And last but not least nothing! I hope that you guys can add to this list and tell me what you do!
Monday, January 18, 2010
The Pains of a rewrite...
I am finished! Finally! YES!!!! No, not really. That’s when the sadness comes, or the excitement for some people like me. It's either time for edit like crazy or better yet just rewrite. You might be reading this and being like, rewrite, you kidding? but no I am not, not really i mean. I edited and edited away like crazy until I went crazy but a rewrite was still in order. Why? Because when I started to rewrite I managed correcting so much plot holes, so many fragments and so many errors that I would not have noticed as I edited. Yes I know it might be painful to need to completely start over and rewrite your story, but believe me it is well worth it. Since my first novel I rewrote it to a completely different novel that I am so proud of. The first draft had so many holes, errors and unwanted characters that I simply took away. Yes, be gone you Mary-sue characters. I even decided that making my old antagonist my new protagonist would bring extreme internal conflict to the story. So basically speaking for me, I just rewrote everything practically turning my old project into a completely new novel. I kept a few aspects like one character, but everything else changed. Tell me what you guys think of the pains of a rewrite and whether you choose to do them or not?
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Fantasy vs. Reality
No matter how hard we writers try to withstand it, our characters live with us. We write them on paper in ink or on the white computer spread sheet, but they are our pure imaginations, the figments of fantasy in our minds. This topic really made me curious, how do we come up with characters? Do we perhaps spin known images in our mind to come up with the perfect fit? What if my lead character has my sister’s nose or an actor’s face or perhaps just a stranger’s? Recent studies I looked at say that our characters are spun from all those images that our mind process every single day of our lives. It’s just like writing music. The melodies come to you from universal channels, from songs that you have heard, and from notes that that musician just played. That is simply how our brains work. We use everything we have; we combine it, to create something new and something completely unique. Something of our own, yet it’s simply a puzzle that is laid out from many pieces that have already been known, and that have been laid out by others.
As I think of it more and more. It is the same writing a novel. People say that nothing can be completely unique, and I never agreed until just recently. Why? Maybe just because I believed in my idea so much that I thought that I had created something amazing and I still do. But as I think of it more and more I realize that my novel is simply a puzzle laid out from so many pieces that I have already experienced. Whether those pieces are figments of my own life, strangers, movies, the media or even other books. As I wander off to this topic, I ask myself a question. A question that haunts my mind like an unwanted guest. Is that all there is to our imagination? Is that how our brain works? Combining what we already know to create something new? We create our fantasy worlds to believe in, yes. Some authors create something that they wish that they themselves could experience. Some wish that they could pick up a sword and have the skills of their main character, and some believe in their characters as if they were real. The reason for my points is simple and related to my title. Isn’t Fantasy basically reality? We make it up from what we see, what we sense, touch and feel. And sometimes we even get so lost in our own created worlds that our characters seem real to us, and we just cannot abandon this novel that we are writing because this character really means something to us. Tell me what you guys think.
A.E
As I think of it more and more. It is the same writing a novel. People say that nothing can be completely unique, and I never agreed until just recently. Why? Maybe just because I believed in my idea so much that I thought that I had created something amazing and I still do. But as I think of it more and more I realize that my novel is simply a puzzle laid out from so many pieces that I have already experienced. Whether those pieces are figments of my own life, strangers, movies, the media or even other books. As I wander off to this topic, I ask myself a question. A question that haunts my mind like an unwanted guest. Is that all there is to our imagination? Is that how our brain works? Combining what we already know to create something new? We create our fantasy worlds to believe in, yes. Some authors create something that they wish that they themselves could experience. Some wish that they could pick up a sword and have the skills of their main character, and some believe in their characters as if they were real. The reason for my points is simple and related to my title. Isn’t Fantasy basically reality? We make it up from what we see, what we sense, touch and feel. And sometimes we even get so lost in our own created worlds that our characters seem real to us, and we just cannot abandon this novel that we are writing because this character really means something to us. Tell me what you guys think.
A.E
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