How to Get Inspired to Write NOW

Want to get inspired to write? That’s easy. Write. Inspiration comes when you’re writing:

Like Chuck Close (“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”), Isabel Allende (“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”), E. B. White (“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”)

Write a word. Then another one.

You prime the writing pump with words.

Sooner or later, inspiration will find you, and the words will flow. Try it.

 

Write Your Novel: Make the Emotional Connection With Lists

Awake to Darkness

Writing a novel? You want it to sell, don’t you? Yes, I know, it’s a stupid question. However, it’s easy to get so caught up in the writing, that you forget that the reader wants something… an emotional experience.

Lists can help with that:

If you’re disappointed with the sales of your Kindle novels, there’s usually just one answer — get more emotion into your books. Readers will forgive you just about anything, as long as they get an emotional payoff from your books.

Read the above article, and start using lists.

Share your experiences with lists in the comments, I’d love to hear how they work for you… 🙂

photo credit: Rakka via photopin cc

Writing a Novel? You Don’t Need to Be Perfect, But…

Parts of a horse

Writing a novel is exciting. Your imagination helps you to build an entire world, into which you take your readers. For a few hours, you allow your readers to escape their daily lives. Their heartbreaks, stress and boredom drop away. You’re giving them a gift.

Be careful: don’t snatch away that gift, and jolt your readers awake. It’s easily done.

Last week I was reading an historical novel. I loved the world of the novel, and surrendered to it.

Suddenly I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The hero helped the heroine onto her horse, and she kicked it in the withers to get it moving. Withers?! What on earth was she, a contortionist? The withers are just above the shoulders on a horse, they’re the highest part of the back. I would have loved to have seen anyone, in a sidesaddle no less, kick a horse in the withers…

A little grumpy, I went back to reading. She kicked the horse in the withers again. AND she called her horse’s fetlock something else, I forget what.

At that stage, I removed the novel from the Kindle app on my iPad. My fictional dream was destroyed, by a careless author.

How challenging would it have been to look up the parts of a horse on Wikipedia?

When you’re writing your novel, you WILL make mistakes.

As I said in this article:

It’s impossible to write the “perfect” novel, and never make mistakes. You will make mistakes in every novel you write. However, those mistakes shouldn’t be egregious. If something’s easy to look up — details of crime scene procedures, Regency-period forms of address — look them up.

The fear of making mistakes shouldn’t stop you writing. You WILL make mistakes. That’s fine. Just do your best to correct mistakes. ASK questions. Check your facts. For aficionados of a genre, an author’s mistakes, especially if they show the author’s been lazy, show disrespect for readers.

No one’s perfect. Have fun writing your novel. When you’re writing, focus on it completely, and let yourself go. However, at some stage before publication, check facts carefully. You owe it to your readers, and they’ll love you for taking them away from their woes for a few hours.

 

Can’t Write? Tell a Story

Use your imagination: tell a story

Over the weekend, I chatted with a writer who’s written several nonfiction books, and wants to write a novel.

He’s used to doing lots of research, coming up with ideas, testing the ideas, and writing. But he’s procrastinating on his fiction.

My advice? Start writing. Fill the computer screen with words.

As I said in this post on writing what you don’t know:

Please take this to heart: all writing is discovery.

Let’s say you want to write a thriller about a hit man (or a hit woman.) This will be a real challenge for you if you’re anything like me, and are squeamish about using snail bait, or swatting a spider.

Nevertheless, if I had a great idea for a book, and the main character happened to kill people for a living, I could write it. And so could you.

Here’s why. Fiction is all about emotion. You’ve had every emotion everyone else has had. You’ve been angry — and you’ve gone beyond anger to primal rage. Neither feeling is comfortable. You may want to tap into that when you’re writing about your hit person. Not for the killer, but for the person who’s hired him.

I suggested that he tell himself his story first.

Start with “Once upon a time…”

Like so:

Once upon a time, a man called Chris lived with his wife, Pamela, and their little boy, Jesse. Chris loved his wife, and was shocked when one day, someone at work told him that his wife was having an affair.

At first, Chris didn’t believe it. Then, he decided to…

See how it works?

Just pretend that you’re telling someone a story. I like to record these musings into Dragon Dictate. After ten or 20 minutes, I’ve got the bones of a story.

This is a painless way of getting the kernel of a story. Just start with a couple of characters, and a situation. Once you’ve got that, you can either outline your scenes, or you can start writing. I tend to just start writing; I create an outline once I’ve got around 10,000 words. Do what feels right to you.

have fun. 🙂
photo credit: maize// via photopin cc

Writing Career: 11 Easy Writing Tips

Want to make money writing? These tips will help, whether you’re a seasoned writer, or a complete beginner…

Write stuff people want, and for which they’ll pay TODAY

It’s a thrill to write something, and get dollars in your PayPal account quickly.

A couple of months back, I wrote a series of blog posts on making $500 a day from your writing.

If you read those posts, you’ll see that people pay for many different kinds of writing. Make a list of what YOU could write, for which people pay.

Read the rest of the article here.

 

Write and Sell: Ten Fast Sales You Can Make

Write and Sell: Ten Fast Sales You Can Make

Over the weekend, I chatted with a “bored” writer, and sent her the above article. If you’re bored, you’re not growing — do something different. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you regain your enthusiasm.

Flipboard: Become An Instant Publisher

Create Your Own Line of Magazines: Publish your writing

On my freelance writing blog, I talked about creating your own magazine in minutes, if you have an iOS device.

You create your magazines on the Flipboard app. It’s free.

Why create your own magazines?

Primarily, to publish and promote your writing. It doesn’t matter what your aim is as a writer, if you want to make money doing it, you need to get in front of people who can hire you (if you want to write for others), or buy your books.

Flipboard helps you to do that. You can add anything you  like to your magazines (as long as the content is published somewhere online), and people can subscribe to your magazines.

The new Magazines feature in Flipboard is very new, it’s only been available for three weeks. In two weeks, 500,000 Magazines were created.

As you might imagine, large companies are jumping on this feature. You can too. It took me around five minutes to create this magazine.

Give it a try — show the world how creative you are. 🙂

Adventure Is Just a Romantic Name for Trouble

“Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it’s hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.”

– Louis L’Amour

Can You Still Write Articles For The Web?

New writers want to start off writing simple material. For many years, that’s meant writing Web articles. I had a couple of questions this week: can you still make money writing these articles?

These days businesses need web content for their websites. They also need content to draw traffic. One of the most popular ways to do this is by using content to market their site. “Content marketing” has become hugely popular, because it’s cost-effective. An online article can stay online and attract traffic for years. Advertising on the other hand, stops drawing traffic when the advertising stops. Moreover, online advertising has become expensive.

Yes, you can. The article will get you started. If you want to make a career of Web writing, SYWON (Sell Your Writing Online Now) helps you to do that.

Coming Up This Week: Web Writing, Blogging in 60 Minutes a Week

Here we are at the start of another week. I hope you’re looking forward to it.

If you’re in the northern hemisphere, I hope that spring has sprung for you. Down in the south, in Sydney Australia, we’re headed for winter. Thank heavens the humidity has gone, and that the nights are cooler.

On the freelance writing blog this week, our theme will be Web writing. I’ve chosen this theme in conjunction with the prelaunch of my new program. Check it out of you’re a Web writer, and want to increase your income without writing.

I created this new program because writers develop blinkers. (I know I do.) We’re too focused on just the writing, and we fail to see other opportunities. Let’s see if we can remove the blinkers. 🙂

On the Creativity Factory, we’ll be discussing blogging. Our theme is managing your blog in just 60 minutes a week. If you’ve been putting off blogging because you don’t have the time, I hope the series will help.

Back to fiction (again)

In 2010 I started a couple of novels for Kindle publication. I’d given up writing novels after too many hassles with literary agents. The writing progressed brilliantly, until I was commissioned to ghostwrite several novels. Never one to turn away writing work, I let the work on my own novels lapse.

That’s the challenge of writing in the age of the Internet: there’s SO much work around for writers, that we get sidetracked.

I woke up the other morning with a complete plot for a new novel in my head. So, I wrote it down. I love the idea of this new book, and I’ll be writing this novel first, before I go back to my 2010 novels.

Do you plan your week’s writing? Please share.

Onward… 🙂

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