The Write Spot Blog by Marlene Cullen

Blog

  • Does your book concept have legs?

    Today’s guest blogger, Jerry Jenkins, has written a thorough article, “How to Write a Book: Everything You Need to Know in 20 Steps.”

    I love lists, so of course I was intrigued to find out more. And I love it when writers talk about passion.

    Listed below are a few of Jerry’s steps about writing a book, excerpted or paraphrased from his comprehensive list (link at the bottom of this post).

    • Where to start…
    • What each step entails…
    • How to overcome fear, procrastination, and writer’s block…
    • And how to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

    Establish your writing space.

    If you dedicate a room solely to your writing, you can write off a portion of your home mortgage, taxes, and insurance proportionate to that space. You can also write in restaurants and coffee shops.

     Assemble your writing tools.

    Try to imagine everything you’re going to need in addition to your desk or table, so you can equip yourself in advance and don’t have to keep interrupting your work to find things like:

    Stapler

    Paper clips

    Rulers

    Pencil holders

    Pencil sharpeners

    Note pads

    Printing paper

    Please click on the link below to see the rest of the list.

    Break the project into small pieces.

    Writing a book feels like a colossal project, because it is! But your manuscript will be made up of many small parts.

    An old adage says that the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

    Try to get your mind off your book as a 400-or-so-page monstrosity.

    See your book for what it is: a manuscript made up of sentences, paragraphs, pages. Those pages will begin to add up, and though after a week you may have barely accumulated double digits, a few months down the road you’ll be into your second hundred pages.

    So keep it simple.

    Start by distilling your big book idea from a page or so to a single sentence—your premise. The more specific that one-sentence premise, the more it will keep you focused while you’re writing.

    Settle on your BIG idea.

    To be book-worthy, your idea has to be killer.

    You need to write something about which you’re passionate, something that gets you up in the morning, draws you to the keyboard, and keeps you there. It should excite not only you, but also anyone you tell about it.

    If you’ve tried and failed to finish your book before—maybe more than once—it could be that the basic premise was flawed. Maybe it was worth a blog post or an article but couldn’t carry an entire book.

    Think The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, or How to Win Friends and Influence People. The market is crowded, the competition fierce. There’s no more room for run-of-the-mill ideas. Your premise alone should make readers salivate.

    Go for the big concept book.

    How do you know you’ve got a winner? Does it have legs? In other words, does it stay in your mind, growing and developing every time you think of it?

    Run it past loved ones and others you trust.

    Does it raise eyebrows? Elicit Wows? Or does it result in awkward silences?

    The right concept simply works, and you’ll know it when you land on it. Most importantly, your idea must capture you in such a way that you’re compelled to write it. Otherwise you’ll lose interest halfway through and never finish.

    From Marlene:  Are you getting the idea that Jerry Jenkin’s article is a complete guide to writing a book?

    It’s worth a click: How to Write a Book: Everything You Need to Know in 20 Steps.

     

  • Thumbnail sketches

    Figure drawing classes often start with timed gesture drawings of initial poses lasting as short as five seconds before the model moves. Gradually the time increases to 10, 15 and 30 seconds. By the time you get to a minute, it feels as if you have all day to capture the pose on your sketch pad. The idea is to keep you free, dexterous and more focused on process than product. Such short bursts also keep you from taking yourself too seriously—otherwise, you’d quickly become frustrated. —“Train Your Eye for Better Writing,” by Tess Callahan, Writer’s Digest September 2017

    Tess suggests you can do the same with writing. “At odd moments throughout the day, in a diner or in transit, jot down gestures, expressions or snatches of overheard dialogue. . . . Whether or not these little moments make it into whatever story you are writing, they will deepen your awareness of human expressions, inflections and gaits.”

    Most visual artists don’t start on a big canvas without doing countless thumbnail sketches that help sharpen their skills and drive their vision. Writers can benefit from the same.—Tess Callahan

  • The Wax Paper

    The Wax Paper

    The Wax Paper is a broadsheet publication open to all forms of written word, image, and collected conversation. The first priority of The Wax Paper is to expand our understanding of the people we share the world with, and in doing so, expand our understanding of ourselves. Pieces will be selected on their ability to illuminate the humanity and significance of the subjects that inhabit the work.

    The Wax Paper was inspired by the life of Louis “Studs” Terkel. Our name is taken after his first radio show, The Wax Museum, a groundbreaking program, emblematic of his democratic fondness of variety, in which arias were played alongside folk ballads. We look to populate The Wax Paper with pieces that share the spirit inherent in Studs’ written work.  Work that required patient observation, remained steadfast in its empathy, and displayed genuine vitality.

    Studs Terkel’s voice and the voices he collected are a necessary antidote to the rising flood of overtures and platitudes gushing from advertisers, politicians, corporations, and zealots. Their whispers and broadcasts are often seductive and well-crafted. They tickle our fleeting desires and exploit our fears. The Wax Paper stands in direct opposition to their messages. We will oppose them by publishing pieces created with careful observation, empathy, and vitality.

    Submission Guidelines

     

  • The reader reads for dialogue.

    “The reader reads for dialogue more than anything.

    The writer’s habit is to describe, but the reader would rather hear the character.”

    —    Anthony Varallo, May 2017, The Writer

  • The Rumpus

    How could you resist submitting to a magazine named The Rumpus!

    “The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how.” — The Rumpus

    “The Rumpus is dedicated to fostering new voices: We want to introduce you to authors you’ve never heard of before . . .”

    The Rumpus has boosted the careers of writers such as Roxane Gay and Cheryl Strayed. Maybe you’ll be next on the “boosted career” list.

    Submit!

     

     

  • Super Power. . . Prompt #342

    If you could have a super power, what would you choose?

    Why did you choose that super power?
    What would you do if you had that super power?

  • I don’t know what I’m doing . . .

    “Eventually, I stop looking back and being prissy about the beginning, but I’m pretty prissy about it for a long while. At a certain point, I only go forward. I allow myself to write a chunk where I can say, ‘You know, I don’t know what I’m really doing here. It’s a bit messy.’ I cut myself some slack. I can also write with blind spots where I say, ‘I know I’m going to have to figure this out later I don’t know what the answer is right now but that’s OK,’ and I can keep writing.” —Julianna Baggott

    Excerpt from “Pure Writer,” by Elfrieda Abbe, The Writer Magazine, January 2016

    Note from Marlene: When you get to a “stuck” place in your writing, type ‘xyz” or “something here” in red at your sticky spot.You can come back to that unsettled place later and fix it. 

    Take a break. Get up, walk around, have a sip of water, look out a window. Then get back to your writing.  Just Write!

     

     

  • Emulate Writers to Improve Your Writing

    The following is an excerpt from “Train Your Eye for Better Writing,” by Tess Callahan, September 2017, Writer’s Digest:

    “I encourage my students to read deeply a broad range of writers, and after each one, try writing a few sentences in that wordsmith’s style. For example, take a signature line from William Faulkner. . . and, while keeping the sentence structure intact, pluck out all of the nouns and verbs and replace them with your own.

    Don’t place these emulated lines directly into your own writing. . . Instead, the idea is to practice emulating lines so that the many different styles can work their way into your brain, spin around in the blender of your subconscious, and serve to inform your own unique voice.

    No art form exists in a vacuum. The impressionists were friends and rivals who hung around in the same cafes, shared, traded and borrowed, and pushed one another forward. Dancers learn from dancers. New musical genres develop because artists keep responding to one another.

    The excellent book Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose helps readers pull aside the curtain to notice what the author-magician is doing, to isolate how each one manages gesture, dialogue and character development, and to learn from others’ strengths and weaknesses.”

    Note from Marlene:  You can use any author’s writing for this exercise. Suggest using a genre that you want to write in. No matter what, Just Write!

    Another blog post that might be helpful:  How to be a better writer.

  • Writers are such heady creatures . . .

    “Writes are such heady creatures that we often forget our characters have bodies and senses. To fully imagine a life, one has to supply undeniable details about the exterior world so that when the novelist has to make the truly improbable leap to the interior world of another human being, the reader is primed to believe us.”  —Julianna Baggott

    Excerpt from “Pure Writer,” by Elfrieda Abbe, The Writer Magazine, January 2016

  • Flash fiction: What it is and where to submit

    “Flash fiction goes by many names: microfiction, sudden fiction, short-short, postcard fiction, etc. Its word count runs anywhere from 140 characters to over a thousand words, generally capping out at 1500.

    A short-short story has to handle all the fictional elements seamlessly within an extremely tight space. Give these extreme parameters, what makes a piece of flash fiction truly great?”  —“Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” by Jack Smith, May 2017, The Writer

    “It’s a great artistic expression,” states Kim Chinquee, author of Oh Baby Flash Fictions and Prose Poetry. “Key attributes [for flash fiction]: Language. Imagery. Surprise. Things that are left out. Elements such as tone and point-of-view can fill in for the plot. Rhythm. And a smashing title and ending.”

    Smith writes in this article, “Hundreds of publications are open to flash fiction.”

    Here are some of them:

    Atticus Review

    The Carolina Quarterly

    Smokelong Quarterly

    More places to submit flash fiction.

    Photo credit: christina Gleason