10 Reasons Why We Keep On Writing by Robert W. Walker

#1. We are driven; it is an addiction hardly controllable. Some call it a gift, others call it a curse.

#2 . We are creators. We get to play God. We craft the good, the bad, and the ugly characters; furthermore, we get to decide on their FATEs, their LIVEs, and if they should live or die. It is a rush.

#3. We novelist, playwrights, script writers get to play all the parts, whereas actors typically are held to one part and one role only. So it is like what we did as kids – play. Writing is play and should be a playful “art” and “science”.


#4. We can tell people we are “Working” while we are “Playing” and no one is any the wiser.


#5. We get to create metaphors for what we do and metaphor creation for your “work” is in and of itself a fun activity as in “Writing is easy, like picking a scab until it bleeds, and when it stops bleeding, you pick at it for the next scene.” Or Writing is easy, all you have to do is open a vein….like lifting a raw egg of a linoleum floor….your turn to play.

#6. We write for our first reader – ourselves – which includes the guy who loves everything we spout, and the harsh critic within that detests everything we spout. We stiff arm both and somehow continue writing only by not settling for self-hype or mean-spirited criticism from that side of the brain that dislikes everything.

#7. Because we are “supposed” to….as in now I gotta get this blog outta my head an onto paper…or I have a deadline to meet with a story….or a self-imposed deadline.

#8. Because we love language and anything to do with language, and we love working in the “materials” of language and using the “tools” of language to craft “Kodak moments” and memorable scenes that move people to feel one emotion or another; in other words to wield the most powerful weapon on earth – Words. That which is mightier than the sword.

#9. Because we have a pack of lies (fiction/ficciones) inside us that have to get outside of us in order to “prove” a truth, quite often a truth surrounding the human condition. We are observers of the parade…the floating opera of life and we feel put here to make observations on same and pass them along to unsuspecting readers who think we are just entertainers.

#10. We write for money as well; we pray to be able to make a living at this “work” that we are passionate about, and if we can’t make a living at it, we spend a lifetime in another job to support the “habit”.

I write for craft and for money, and I have taught writing for over thirty years to support the addiction and the “need”. When I teach a creative writing class, I see two kinds of “writers come through the door – he who sees it as a glamorous thing to be recognized and called a writer or novelist or screenwriter (and most of these fail), and he or she who MUST write in order to breathe more easily, to get the stories and voices out of their heads and off their chests before the panic and pain of NOT writing these things out gets to them. In other words, a poet’s got to write poetry despite the fact there is no money in poetry and no poetry in money. And a woodworker has to work in wood, and a sculptor in stone….so a writer in words.

See if I live up to the ten reasons by picking up a copy of my latest work, DEAD ON. My wife, Miranda’s The WELL MEANING KILLER displays the same NEED to be written on every page.
Happy Writing and please feel free to leave a #11 or #12 etc. as a comment. Would love to hear from you.

Rob Walker
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

The Staples of Writing! by DL Larson

Today my husband is hosting an appreciation dinner for his clients. It will be a simple pork chop bar-b-que at the community building with much discussion on farming and the upcoming harvest. My job is simple enough, I hand out door prizes and smile to those arriving. It's tradition by now. My "official" job came earlier ~ I provided all the desserts!

Every year I stock up on flour, eggs, oil and sugar before I even decide what I plan to make. Those ingredients are the staples of baking. And as I started preparing my fourth cake yesterday, I realized how basic ingredients can be whipped into such various delights. Writing is pretty much the same.

Every writer needs the basics: a plot, characters, setting and CONFLICT. Without those four components the story will not develop. They can be twisted or flattened in numerous ways, but they have to hold together to support whatever is going to happen in the future.

And the timing has to be worked out. Timing is important to a baker and just as significant in building a story. I certainly didn't want a gooey cake to serve today, undone and unfit to eat; nor did I want to offer one that stayed too long in the oven. Burned and dried is not my goal. So timing is critical. Good timing needs to be paced out beforehand, decided upon in a tried and true manner. Hopefully it will be a delight to the reader, but never to the writer! Great pacing of a story takes work, diligent work and is something not to be rushed. Practice makes timing happen. In baking, I simply set the timer and voila` a confectioners delight materalizes from the oven. Not so easy with writing.

A great way to learn about pacing and timing is to read, read and read some more. See how the ones before you made this happen. Timing is an art and needs to be learned just as punctuation needs to be conquered. Adding frills and chills may be intended to be exciting, but if not delivered in a timely fashion it will fall short of its goal.

Have you ever taken a bite of some beautiful cake only to discover it's taste didn't match up with your expectations? The baker missed the mark somehow. His timing was off, his basic ingredients couldn't support his fancy decorations. Chances are you will not finish that piece of cake. Nor will you talk highly of his expertise. The same works for writers.

Be sure your story has a fresh plot, intriguing characters, settings that drop your readers right into the midst of things and plenty of real conflict. Your reader will continue on, devouring every page to the timely conclusion. And if you're really lucky they will spread the word, "you have got to read this book ..."

Now that's a tasty treat any way you look at it!

Til next time ~

DL Larson

Would you pay for a review? by Morgan Mandel

Yesterday at http://morganmandel.blogspot.com we discussed whether or not to pay for a blog book tour.

What about reviews? Would you pay for one, even by a reputable reviewing service?

Oprah's latest pick

Okay, I think I can safely say that just about every writer would love to have an endorsement by Oprah and here's why:

LITTLE, BROWN to print 650,000 copies of new Oprah selection.

This was announced by PW in big bold letters.

Of course, there was the author of The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen) that decided he didn't quite want all the commercial attention and I suppose it's hard to truly judge how one would feel until one is in that situation BUT, as writers we do want our work to be noticed, especially after we've spent so much time, sweat, tears and sometimes blood creating our written product.

We write because we can't not write and we all strive for success but how we measure that success can vary. Sure, I'd love to have a book that I've written and managed to find a publisher who believed in it, recognized by Oprah; but, I think more than anything else I'd love to write a book, find a supportive publisher and have fans and readers who genuinely connect to my story.

I look forward to that happening in the near future.

In the meantime to everyone one I say "Write On!"

A Wondering and a Winner

Hi All,

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to comment last week while I visited at The Word Place. Check the end of this post to find out if you're the winner of a PDF copy of "This Time for Always".

But first, for the wondering...

I'm curious as to how many people out there do book signings and if you feel they're worth your while or not. Here's why I'm wondering.

I had one yesterday. And to be honest, other than getting to hang outside on a gorgeous day with Morgan and Morgot, it was a big fat waste of my time. I sold one book. All together the three of us only sold four. We were at a craft fair/flea market held by a local church. There were lots of people out and about, but no one seemed to be interested in buying books. Maybe we were in the wrong kind of venue. Maybe it's the economy. I don't know what the problem was, but as a business venture, this one was an utter failure.

In fact, other than one I held for my local RWA chapter (Thanks Chicago-North for buying my books!), book signings have not been very successful for me. I've tried two craft fair type venues, a book sale at the local library, and even a special Valentine's Day event at the library and have had similar - as in no - luck. I think in those four events I've sold and signed a total of five books. And I'm not sure they're doing much in the way of getting my name out there. Yesterday we were hard pressed to get people to even take our bookmarks, and those were FREE! Being a small press author with The Wild Rose Press (which I love!), it's tough to get into bookstores to do signings.

So, getting back to the wondering part, what works the best to sell books? Hands-down my best seller when it comes to my books is my mom. She's already "ordered" at least 20 of my new one and it doesn't even come out until May. I think she may have sold more on her own than all of my other venues combined. She's the best promoter money can buy, and when I say 'money', I mean "Thanks, Mom, you're my number one sales person!"

So what works to sell books? Face to face promotion, book signings, social networking, blog tours? I'd love to hear your success stories if you're willing to share. What worked and why do you think it worked?

At any rate, now onto the winner part of the post, which is why you really stopped by to read in the first place!

Congratulations to Terry Odell! You've won a PDF of "This Time for Always". E-mail me at debrastjohn08@yahoo.com so I can get that out to you ASAP. And again, thanks to everyone who stopped by The Word Place last Monday. Be sure to visit there again and check out the rest of Judy's series on The Wild Rose Press and its authors.

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra

www.debrastjohnromance.com

The Magic of Venice

Back from my vacation-not so much a vacation-as research for my next book, I found the perfect setting, Murano, glass and of course Venice.

I will start my tour of Venice with the next blog and I have pictures, over 500 of Venice alone, can we say snap happy, but Venice is stunning and a city like no other.

I was there during two major events, the Venice Film Festival and a huge art festival.

The art festival was unique in that even an old Romanesque Church was converted into an art gallery, and not for religious art, but contemporary abstract pieces were displayed in place of the pews throughout the church.

Getting around Venice is simple, you can’t get lost or you wind up in water, and all signs point to Piazza San Marco. The trick is to actually find it, it’s hard to miss, after all it is a huge square but miss it I did.

The first night there I decided not to waste any time and start my sightseeing, Pizza San Marco beckoned, I wanted to see it at night all lit up. Ha! I found every alley, more than once, every side street, again more than once, except for the elusive grand piazza. Even getting lost is delightful in Venice.

Exhausted I walked back to the hotel, showered and went to sleep

Till next time,
Margot Justes
http://margotsmuse.blogspot.com
www.mjustes.com
A Hotel in Paris ISBN 978-1-59080-534-3
Art brought her to Paris, then a stranger’s death changes her life.
available on amazon.com

PERILS OF PAULINE - CREATING COMPELLING FEMALE LEADS IN MYSTERY FICTION - BY ROBERT W. WALKER

To pull off the so-called “impossible” – getting into the head of the opposite sex and understanding from this point of view, surprisingly enough, surrounds elemental, fundamental reliance on a “woman of substance” inside the VOICE.

VOICE in any dramatic, commercial fiction relies on strong Active Voice over weak passive textbook, WAS/WERE-riddled voices (leave the qualifying voice to the politicians). These basic grammatical decisions (word choice, exorcising qualifiers for absolutes, using active verbs over passives and cripplingly slow helping verbs, and exorcising the verb to be) are the crucibles of language about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style and supported by the fine book Writing Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern. Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you—like a plug in the wall. Or items you fail to utilize.

As small as the choice difference between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, this is “shaping” voice. This “becomes you”--BECOMEs your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset and is normally willing to follow it so long as this voice remains consistent and consistently believable.

So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you make, from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt, leaped and leapt, or using a comma for a dash. I personally make a habit of using contractions, dashes, and mixing sentence types from simple to compound to complex to compound-complex. All my choices…all lessons we continually need to relearn with each book.

All good writing relies on the reader ‘falling for’ your Feminine or Male authorial\narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, little wonder. The holy all of it is this: an author is a trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each ‘choice and decision and element’ at the end of long sticks all at once! Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element, but they all culminate in the overall greatest EFFECT or illusion we writers create. The effect that your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye. (A story is only as good as the effect it has on a reader.)
If I had said the writer is LIKE a trick cyclist rather than stating it as a fact, it rings a different bell, sends a different and less powerful blow. The use of LIKE and AS is terribly overdone in some “voices” in female-lead crime fiction. As are adjectives. As are adverbs. As is the use of passives, especially the WAS/WERE verb—a major killer of action and visualization. These mistaken choices riddle even a great deal of published fiction, and especially in the first person narrative along with the personal pronoun references to the narrator: I, me, my, mine, myself, often using the personal pronoun three and four times in a given sentence.

What a reader hears and pictures comes about as result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—along with images. The author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice creates that sound. A “qualifying” character’s voice can be filled with qualifiers, but you are damned if your narrator or main character’s voice is riddled with qualifying, iffy, wishy-washiness. An absolute gives the same sentence the mental Kodak moments that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like IMAGES. Images are made of this; they are not made of lines like: He was standing as if in a trance, and was soon climbing through a reddish fog that seemed to be lifting amid the treeline that almost acted as a filter to the sunlit Georgia hills. But rather: In a trance, Mick stood and climbed through a coppery red fog filtering through the Georgia treeline.


Robert W. Walker
www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/
htp://acmeauthorslink.blogspot.com
"Dead On takes the reader's capacity for the imagination of horror to stomach turning depths, and then gives it more twists than a Georgia backroad that paves an Indian trail." - Nash Black