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When writing first drafts, a common piece of advice is write fast—just get those ideas on the page so you can take a proper look at them before you start letting your editor start messing with them… Write fast, analyze later. NaNoWriMo is great for creating a structure to force this practice.
There’s some great reasoning behind this practice… but fast firsts aren’t for everyone.
If you’re like me, one of the main reasons you read is to receive an emotional transference from the author. You love books that don’t just make you think, that don’t just entertain, but that make you feel something.
It’s the magic of reading: that an author can arrange a series of letters in a certain order and that these letters can affect our emotions.
As a writer, how do you develop mood in a short story or in the chapter of your novel without telling? Is it possible to build up emotional language without saying what the emotion is? In other words, can you make people feel something without writing like Stefenie Meyer or E.L. James?
Years ago, I found myself chairing the writing contest for my local writers’ organization in conjunction with its annual conference. It was a huge undertaking, but I’d done it before and could do it again.
So I thought.
No, not that kind of oil. Not cooking oil, although the man in this photo is using plenty of it. I refer to the Rembrandt-like quality of this photograph. I’ve been looking at this image for ten years. It is one of the most stunning naturally lit, completely undoctored, photographs I have seen in those ten years.
This photograph carries with it profound and poignant meaning beyond the simple act of making poori, beyond its composition, light, and saturated colors, beyond its timelessness. It carries the stories of a quarter million people who perished ten years ago in a violent natural cataclysm that devastated the shores of eleven countries. No doubt you know which event I’m referring to. Its tenth anniversary is coming up this December 26.
Today I’m sharing this image with you because I’d like you to write a story about it.
If you’ve downloaded our nifty NaNoWriMo calendar then you know that by the end of today, November 3, you should have already written 5,000 words. Depending on how fast you write, that could be a very intimidating number.
How do you write faster for NaNoWriMo? In this post, I’m going to share a trick I’ve used to help me write four books and over 600 blog posts.
Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Are you thinking about participating in it? Do you know what NaNoWriMo even is?
Here are 12 reasons you should (or should NOT) participate in National Novel Writing Month…
This guest post is by Elise Abram. Elise is an English and Computer Studies teacher by day, wife and mother by night, and author whenever she can steal some time. Elise is the author of four books, including her latest book, The Revenant. Check out her...
A lot of writers and writing blogs on the internet are revving up their engines for NaNoWriMo, which starts on Saturday. I’m not one of those masses, mostly because my love is the editing process moreso than the actual story creation and writing process. As much as I champion the benefits of an editorial eye, I believe that the editorial process should be scrapped during NaNoWriMo in favor of making December NaNoEdMo (even though NaNoEdMo is actually in March).
Yesterday, a young writer I’m mentoring told me she’s never hated writing so much. She’s in the middle of writing a book and her once-fun “hobby” has become her nemesis. At each keystroke, writer’s block is threatening to stop her from writing her book for good.
“If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background,” the narrator of Writing Fiction tells us. But how do you create engaging settings that enhance your story? And how can the popular writing software, Scrivener, help you create setting sketches perfect for particular your story?