Time is relative, especially in a writer’s world. It’s easy for any one of us to get sucked into some shiny rabbit hole. We lose time like it’s cool.
We spend time being ‘busy’. Busy marketing on social media. Busy networking with fellow writers. Busy submitting manuscripts to publishers.
You know what we forget? We’re writers. We need to write!
I asked Ted Dekker how long it takes for an author to find their voice.
“It takes four to five novels,” he said. So if the average novel is about 80,000 words, then you have to write 320,000 to 400,000 words before you find your voice.
I love memoir, always have. Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, Annie Dillard, even Stephen King. There’s something magical about the ability to transform ordinary circumstances into beautiful scenes that teach a deeper truth.
Twenty years ago, it seemed the only people qualified to write memoir were the incredibly famous and the I’m-so-disgustingly-rich-I’d-better-write-a-book elite. The rest of us had better keep our mouths shut… or turn our life’s story into a novel.
But recently, more “normal” people are writing powerful reflections on everyday life. So what’s to stop you and me from joining them?
There’s nothing original in the world. Good writers are always stealing ideas from each other and recycling stories. It’s expected. And it’s natural.
I’m finally reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Nobel Prize Winning novel and one of the best selling books of all time. Gabriel GarcÃa Marquez’s novel about a small village in Colombia has become the best known work of magic realism, a literary genre that blends detailed realism with elements that couldn’t possibly exist.
There are things I like and things I don’t like about the novel, but apart from personal taste, it quickly became clear to me GarcÃa Márquez is a great writer, perhaps among the best writers alive (he’s eighty-six).
In this post, we will explore seven writing lessons we can learn from the Colombian master.
There have been too many days when I didn’t know what to write about. I sat here waiting… waiting… waiting, but nothing came to me.
I used to think that some mornings I just wasn’t meant to write anything. Inspiration did not visit me, and instead I wasted hours drinking cold coffee while staring blankly at my computer screen.
Well, frankly, that sucked. So I started something new.
