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I don’t write thrillers. But after The Write Practice team and I talked with Joanna Penn, author and popular blogger of The Creative Penn, I kind of wanted to.
When Joanna agreed to chat with the team and I, she didn’t know we were going to post this here, but the conversation was so fascinating that I wanted you to see it. Fortunately, Joanna was generous enough to let me share it with you.
Have you ever attended a writer conference? If not, what the hell are you waiting for?
If you have, did you get the most you possibly could out of it? If you did, great. I want to hear all about it in the comments. If not, you need to read this post.
I’ve recently discovered that whenever I think something is great or fantastic, and it’s worth commenting on how great or fantastic it is, I default to the exact same word in every conversation. It’s “awesome”. Everything is awesome.
If it’s funny, it’s awesome. If it’s pretty, it’s awesome. If it makes you think, it’s awesome. If it’s a weird random fact, it’s awesome. It’s funny because most of the time, I speak in SAT words.
When the big life answers don’t come in my time frame, I need to turn my attention to and be grateful for the beauty that fills my life in an everyday way—and find inspiration there. The same goes for our writing. While we trying to get the big stuff down—genre, characters, plot, narrative story arc , we need to focus, too, on the smallest supporting cast if you will—the objects and experiences that can either be overlooked OR unearthed, examined and celebrated.
I was talking to a friend the other night, and somewhere in the conversation we started making guesses about where the rest of our crew was at that point in the night. I started to say, “I assume…” but then I stopped myself and had a second guess moment. “Assume? Presume? Which one is it?” Obviously since we live in the age of smartphones and instant Google, I looked it up. Believe it or not, there is a slight difference, and I’m sharing it with you today.
Do you write from personal experience? Or you rather get lost in imaginary worlds and alternate realities, full of superheroes and alien creatures?
Our imaginations are endless and should be exploited creatively as much as possible. And yet, the number one writing advice says: ‘Write what you know’. Does this suggest that only war veterans can write about wars, or that Jules Verne really went around the world in 80 days?
Honestly, I used to hate this epic instruction. It somehow suggested that everything anyone writes is utterly personal and resembles the writer’s soul. Which simply isn’t true.
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.
Since publishing his latest book, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has taken quite a few lashings from critics. One science writer in particular, Christopher Chabris—who incidentally helped defrock Jonah Lehrer—suggested Gladwell intentionally promotes bad science to manipulate people just so he can sell more books.
Another author, David Epstein, writer of The Sports Gene, argued that “the 10,000 hour rule” which Gladwell coined in his bestselling book may not be as true as everyone was led to believe. Sure, practice is important, he said, but all the practice in the world is useless without innate talent. Runners who start out slow (or writers who start out bad, for that matter) don’t become world class, no matter how many hours of practice they put in.
Every writer cringes a little when reading terrible dialogue. I know I do. Don’t you just hate the stiff, awkward characters who speak formally no matter the situation? It’s awful. But what if we’re those writers? Here are three tips to avoid that.
Over the weekend, Joe sent me a link to a blog that talks about how students are apparently saying “all of the sudden” instead of “all of a sudden”. Is that a thing? It was actually the first time I’d heard of the words in idioms being switched around. In case there was any confusion, “all of the sudden” is incorrect, “all of a sudden” is correct, and whoever created the idiom made it a completely arbitrary decision.
