Looking For Your Ideal Reader?
Tabitha King is her husband’s Ideal Reader. In the past decades she has been the first person in Stephen King’s mind while he sat at his desk transforming his ideas into black on white stories.
Timeless Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Super Complicated
Are there times when you want to write something different; to create something special and lasting that readers will find important?
Now, you know as well as I writing something timeless isn’t as easy. I was recently inspired by a book called A Grand Complication: The Race to Build the World’s Most Legendary Watch, by Stacy Perman, a fascinating book about watchmaking and collecting in the early 20th century.
After reading the book, I was struck by the many lessons fine watchmaking can teach about writing. Here are 3 of my favorites.
How to Cope with All the Waiting You’ll Do As a Writer
Sometimes, the hardest part of writing is the time spent not writing. Can anything good possibly come from waiting? Time is money, right? A precious resource?
If you think about it, the process of writing is pockmarked with periods of waiting. Long, interminable periods of waiting. You wait for ideas to strike. You wait for time to write. You wait for your browser to load your Web history full of research. You wait (sometimes a long, long time) on your brain, to make the connections your characters need to get from Act I to Act III.
Once your long wait is over, and you have a completed work in your hands, read, re-read, edited, revised, proofed and ready to make its way through the creeks and streams of the publishing world to an agent, a publisher, a contest or a magazine. You send it off, breathe a sigh of relief, and you wait. And wait. And wait some more.
How can we make sure the time spent waiting isn’t wasted?
How to Know When You Are Ready to Write a Novel
You’ve been thinking about writing a novel for years now. You’ve had ideas swimming around in your head for as long as you can remember.
You’ve researched the best webinars, workshops, and creative writing degrees. Or maybe you’ve taken some writing courses, read all the “how to” books, and even went to a writing conference.
And after all this, you still don’t feel ready.
Why You Should Use Symbolism In Your Writing
Nothing adds depth and meaning to a story like symbolism. It acts as webbing between theme and story. Themes alone can sound preachy, and stories alone can sound shallow. Symbolism weaves the two together.
What better way is there to avoid “telling” and instead “show” your story? A symbol conveys complex ideas with few words. Symbolism can also achieve the same results as several sentences of explicit imagery. How’s that on your Show-And-Tell Meter? If a picture is worth a thousand words, a symbol is worth ten-thousand.
The most critical reason I use symbols for me is inspiration. I may have to do upfront research, often spending a few hours collecting a list of symbols for each story, but, like an investment, I get a continual creative flare from it.
