by Joe Bunting |
There’s a type of question I get every once in a while that always surprises me. Here are a few:
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that incorrect?
- Isn’t that a run-on sentence?
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that a fragment of a sentence?
- Isn’t that breaking the rules?
- Shouldn’t you fix your contractions? You don’t want to sound so informal, do you?
These questions surprised me because early on I learned that the best writers regularly break the rules. In fact, in every art form, from painting to sculpture to writing, one of the rules is to break the rules.
However, there is one dirty secret about breaking rules. I think it’s this secret that enables us to chide Stephenie Meyer and our eighth graders for not following the rules all while celebrating James Joyce for basically writing the book on rule breaking.
by Joe Bunting |
PRACTICE
Yesterday was my birthday. So I thought, Why don’t we write about birthdays?
But as I tried to write about my nice, happy birthday, I realized, Happy birrthdays are boring!
Instead, let’s write about the worst birthdays we (or our characters) ever had.
Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post be sure to give feedback to a few other Practitioners.
by Joe Bunting |
If you’re trying to build your author platform, you want your site both to look good and be highly functional. Plugins are tools that do both, and they are one of the biggest reasons to upgrade from a free Wordpress site to a self-hosted Wordpress site.
In this post, I’m going to briefly describe sixteen plugins I use personally. My hope is that this list helps you create a strong author platform that brings you thousands of readers. That’s not too much to hope for, right?
by Joe Bunting |
“Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas,” says Frank Warren, “of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us.”
In November 2004, Frank Warren gave out a few hundred postcards to strangers with simple instructions: write a secret you’ve never told anyone before, and mail it back. It was supposed to be a small, community art project, but then something strange happened. All the postcards came back. And then something stranger happened, he kept getting new ones.
Secrets went viral.
Since then, Frank has received over 500,000 postcards, many of which are available on the project’s blog, postsecret.com, or in one of his five books of secrets. The remarkable thing is not how widely Postsecret has spread. What’s shocking is that no one thought of it before.
by Joe Bunting |
“Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” says Charlan Nemeth. “It wakes us right up.”
The single best part of running this blog is the amazing community that has sprung up. One reader recently told me, “I have to say your blog is the bomb. It’s got the best, most lively and connected community.” I couldn’t agree more. Our Practitioners are the coolest blog readers on the Internet.
We tend to be some of the nicest, too. I love seeing all the nice comments after someone’s practice, “This was so great! I loved it. Thanks for sharing this with us! Yada yada yada.” Overall, we’re a very encouraging group, and I love that about us.
However, I recently read some research that has me questioning our niceness and asking some tough questions:
Does encouragement make you a better writer?
Will being nice help us improve as a community?
Do we need to be more critical of each other’s work?
