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Writing Words - writing it is the only way of getting it written
I've just finished my 750words.com entry for today. I've written every day in June so far and I'm on an 19-day writing streak. Online morning pages, that's 750words.com in a nutshell.
The term morning pages was coined by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way. The idea is that you get the clutter out of your head by writing three pages in longhand first thing in the morning, and then you can create the things that matter. 750words.com is for those of us who'd rather type their morning pages.
I agree that there's something about writing by hand that gets ideas flowing, but as far as stream of consciousness writing is concerned, I find that typing works better for me. I'm much faster typing and it's easier to follow my crazy thoughts that way.
I don't always manage to write my 750 words first thing in the morning. But whenever possible, I write them before I sit down to write anything that would benefit from a clean mind, like short stories, screen plays and blog posts. Often I use the site for brainstorming, too, and I allow myself to go off on any tangent that tempts me. I usually end up with a handful of good ideas or a usable paragraph or two, and some more material that I can use with a bit of editing. It does help me get ideas out, I can always develop them, turn my jumbled thoughts into intelligible prose later.
Sometimes, when I don't have time to write anything else, writing my 750 words helps me to keep up the momentum. Yes, sometimes my entries are very random, sometimes they turn into a bit of a moan-fest about why I'm not writing etc., but at least I can look back and say: But I wrote something. I wasn't having the best day, but I did it anyway. It's the best I can do sometimes, and it's good that I did it. On days like this, when time is scarce and I'm tired and I don't feel like writing, writing despite of it all is a victory. Bad writing is still writing, and nobody ever needs to see it. I don't have to re-read my entries. I do, though. I download the zip file of my entries every month and go through it. While I usually use the good bits immediately, I miss stuff sometimes. So it's good to dig it up and make the most of it, be reminded of this weird stuff that my subconscious throws at me when I give it a chance.
Also, 750words.com is great as a personal writing trainer. It gives me an incentive for showing up on the treadmill every day and it rewards me in the form of badges. I look forward to it, especially on days when I don't get a chance to sit down for 20 minutes until late. More often than not, my morning pages are evening pages these days. I don't care, as long as I get the thing written. I'd prefer to write early in the day, but if I can't, I can't (the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and I cannot change what the baby wants and when she wants it). So I write whenever, and if it turns out it's after 9pm, I have something to look forward to all day. 20 minutes I have to myself, doing something just for me. 750words.com equals precious me time. I don't get much of it at the moment, but that's the trade-off I knew I was letting myself in for when I embarked on this motherhood adventure.
Writing with a baby is challenging, and anything that makes it easier has to be cherished. I know I could just sit down and write three pages in Pages every day, I don't need a website for it. But it's things like seeing that I'm on an 19-day writing streak, getting badges because I've written x many days in a row etc. that make me do it some days.
So, thank you, 750words.com.
My biggest challenge with writing at the moment is six months (and a bit) old and has recently taken to decorating the kitchen floor with soggy rice cakes. I thought maternity leave would be fab and I'd have lots of time for writing. Now don't get me wrong, maternity leave is fab but there's not much time for writing. Not much at all. And, to be honest, I'm a bit rubbish at using the little time I have at the moment. I write when I have to (and I have to a lot this month), but I dread to think about what will happen come July. Three long, deadline-free months, and before I know it it's October and I've not written a thing. Not an ideal scenario. I must not let that happen.
That's where the Urban Writers' Retreat Writing Bootcamp comes in. It's designed to get people writing (again), and it's just what I need to make the transition from having to write for uni to writing for the sake of it. Who knows, I might find the time to post here once a week again.
(I was going to post about the bootcamp anyway, and now I might even win a place for writing about it. Bonus!)
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon
I had ambitious plans for March - and now it's almost May. I got ill back then and the time I thought I could spend on blogging was spent sleeping (well, as much as possible with the little one). My ambitious plans went right out the window then. By the time I was better, I had family visiting, and before I knew it, March was over.
For the last few weeks, I've been busy with an assignment for my creative writing degree. I only have an hour or so per day for it and there's no time for blogging. A side effect of working on the assignment is that it's given me lots of ideas for blog posts. It will be a couple of weeks yet before I'll get round to writing them, though.
Given my posting record over the last three months, signing up for NaBloPoMo in March is probable a bit ambitious. On the other hand, writing one blog post a day for a month has a tendency to improve my blogging frequency. Anyway, I'm nothing if not ambitious.
I have an idea, too. I'll use A Word A Day as inspiration. I won't make any plans about what kind of blog posts I'm going to write in order to give me the freedom to respond in any way that suggests itself. Sounds like fun, right?
My Three Years at Writing Words - The good, the bad and the ugly
I first joined Orble (on September 30, 2007) because I wanted to find out if I could actually make some money on the side by doing what I love. I created a profile, started writing and hoped for encouraging signs. I quickly learnt that I wasn't going to get rich from AdSense revenue. I also found out that I enjoyed writing about the writing process and that while it would have been nice to make money from it, money wasn't my main motivation for doing it.
I took over Writing Words because the title seemed fitting. If nothing else, I was writing words. Some of these words formed coherent entities which could one day turn into published prose, some of these words became travel articles I actually sold, some of these words were utter rubbish. But they were words I had written, and writing words was what I did almost every day, so I thought I might just as well go with the title.
Good:
It's kept me writing about writing. Which, in turn, kept me thinking about writing. Every time I wrote a blog post when I'd not written much else at the time, it made me aware that I was neglecting my fiction. And often, that was enough for me to continue work on an existing project or write something new.
Many writers don't spend much time on analysing their particular writing process. Since I started writing about mine here, I have become much more aware of mine. It made me more conscious of myself as a writer, if you will. I'm looking at my process, what inspires me, how I develop ideas. I've not sold any of my fiction, but that doesn't mean I'm not a writer. It's reassuring to see that I have worked on my writing for the last three years, despite full-time jobs and sometimes busy freelancing times on top of it. I enjoy travel writing and don't think I'll ever give it up, but my real writing passion is fiction. Blogging about writing fiction means I have to evolve as a fiction writer and keep on discovering more of my writing process, because otherwise I don't have much to tell you.
I'm keeping my eyes open for fiction writing contests and magazine submissions. There are a lot of opportunities out there for fiction writers. Looking for short story competitions gave me an incentive to write short fiction. I like short stories but always thought I wasn't good at writing them. The truth is, I never tried hard to write short fiction (apart from flash fiction, but even my flash pieces where often part of a bigger story). Of course I wasn't good at it, my short story muscles weren't developed. Now that I've begun to take writing short stories seriously, I'm getting better at it. I'm still far from being a short story pro but I'm willing to work on it.
Bad:
I wish Orble offered more flexibility with the design. Writing Words has looked the way it looks since I took over three years ago and it shows. It would also be nice to have a more mobile-friendly version, more options to share the blog, etc. I'm not a big friend of the facebook "Like" button, but I'd quite like to have a "Tweet this post" button.
Ugly:
I don't think there's anything downright ugly. The platform has its flaws - none of which have driven me away, though. I thought about taking all my content and taking it somewhere else. I decided against it, though. So while a few things could be better, they could be a lot worse, too.
I don't think I'll abandon the blog in the coming three years. This year has shown that whenever I put a bit of effort into blogging, the number of visits goes up. I get a comment here and there, too. It's always good to get feedback, to see that something I wrote helped or inspired somebody else. It's also good to hear other opinions, there's nothing wrong with criticism as long as it's constructive.
So don't be shy, let me know what you think about Writing Words.
September 30th 2010 20:44
Three years ago today, I wrote my first Orble blog post. I don't have the time for a long review, and I think I will save that for October 19, which is my three year anniversary of taking over Writing Words.
So here are just a few thoughts
[ Click here to read more ]
Mills & Boon opened their New Voices competition for submissions yesterday. They are looking for new romance writers (who've not had any novel-length fiction published). During the first stage writers can upload the first chapters of their romance novels. Here's how it works:
- Submit your first chapter until September 22
[ Click here to read more ]
I mentioned the 500-words per day mini-novel challenge in my September challenges post.
I spend an hour or two developing an idea yesterday. It's for a collection of short stories and short short stories that work as stand-alone stories, but taken together they tell a bigger story. It didn't take me long to write the basic outline and I had a few ideas that I loved for the stories. The logical conclusion was to join the mini-novel challenge and aim for a minimum of 500 words a day
[ Click here to read more ]
You think NaNoWriMo is insane? 30 days to finish a novel draft seems like a long time if you consider there's a 3-day novel contest. It takes place this coming weekend (September 4 - 6) and registration is open until Friday. I have to get back to the day job tomorrow and won't be able to write next Monday (it's not a holiday in the UK), so I'm not going to enter the contest. There are plenty of other writing challenges in September, however:
NaBloPoMo: One blog post a day for a month
[ Click here to read more ]
Have you ever read an article in a magazine or a short story in an anthology that made you exclaim: "But that was my idea!" Happened to me today when I got the October issue (#107) of Writers' Forum. There's an article on page 14 called Write a novel in one month which is - you guessed it - about NaNoWriMo.
A few months ago, I thought I should write an article on NaNoWriMo and pitch it to them. I have actually started writing the article but I thought I'd better finish it before I send my pitch to Writers' Forum. So I shouldn't really be surprised that another writer beat me to it. NaNo is only two months and one week away, any writing magazine running an article on it would do it now. I didn't get my act together in time, so I can't complain. Guess I'll have to find another place for my article. Fast
[ Click here to read more ]
Remember my post from January 23? In it, I told you to imagine it was August 23 and asked what you would have achieved by that date. Since it's August 23 today, I ask: What have you achieved as a writer? Where have you succeeded, where have you failed? Do you regret anything you did or didn't do as far as your writing is concerned?
I didn't have any stories published - yet. I'm submitting work to short story competitions, so hopefully I can tick that box by the end of the year. I did, however, get into the writing programme that was top of my list. I'll tell you more about it in about a month when classes start
[ Click here to read more ]
My first submission came in on fifth place in the August 5 issue of Fortitude - not a bad start to my experiment. I didn't make the front page but I'm happy with the result.
The story I submitted was one I wrote about four years ago. I polished it and put it up for the peer review two days ago, and it's live already today. So pieces that have been submitted for review are published rather fast, it seems
[ Click here to read more ]
Today's Copyblogger post suggests that if you want your blog to attract more readers, you should write less. One quality blog post per week rather than one rushed post a day is the way to built a loyal following, according to the post.
Since July (and my participation in NaBloPoMo) ended, I've accidentally continued to post every day. I still have some left-over posting ideas from July and I've come across blog posts and websites that I wanted to share. So I wasn't difficult to post every day. But then it's only August 4 and I am not going to bend over backwards to write every day
[ Click here to read more ]
I've read about Fortitude here and there in the last few weeks but up until now I was sceptical. Until I found out today that they actually charge a membership fee for writers who want to join them. The fee is $23.88 for a year, so it isn't really much but it will scare off the scammers. Especially when you consider that (they say) they pay a minimum of $10 for each submission that is published on their front page.
Thing is, they aren't just looking for news-style articles or how-to articles. They look for any form of writing: opinion pieces, essays, poems and short stories are just as welcome. Now that is really interesting - finally a content website for fiction writers
[ Click here to read more ]
Create Festival: It's About Time - I love the sound of this six-hour writing workshop. The workshop is run by Spread the Word, a London-based writer development agency.
The Create Festival workshop takes place this Saturday (7th of August) in the Eltham Library in Greenwich - what better place for a writing workshop dealing with time. The participation fee is £15 (£10 concessions) - quite a bargain. At the moment, the website shows there are 13 places left
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"I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock in the morning."
Peter De Vries
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First and third person narratives are common forms of narration. In general, writers are told that second person narrative is best avoided.
Thing is, I like telling stories from the second person perspective. I like using "you" rather than "I" or "she" - not in every story I write but every now and again. There are stories when the second person point of view just is the best choice. Stories that almost write themselves. It's fun to address the reader so directly
[ Click here to read more ]
"Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish."
John Jakes
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