A lesson for all, and my favourite quote, from the late Steve Jobs:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
Are you too close to your characters?
You’ve engendered, given traits, and brought your characters to life on the page. It’s not surprising that writers find themselves attached to their characters and are afraid of putting them into complicated situations.
If you’ve created complex and compelling enough characters they will falter and they will hit obstacles. You’re writing a book not a description of the type of friend you’d like.
Think of the most memorable characters in fiction. Jay Gatsby. Elizabeth Bennett. Holden Caulfield. Lisbeth Salander. None of them are perfect. Perfect characters are 2D and forgettable. (more…)
Dialogue, in its most natural state, has the ability to move the plot and show character traits, as well as its most basic function: communication. When I read submissions this often marks the difference between a writer that ‘gets it’ and a writer that has a long way to go.
Dialogue must speak for itself. If you have to set up the dialogue before or explain it after you haven’t written good enough dialogue: (more…)
“As Raymond Federman once wrote, ‘everybody is writing a novel these days,’ even if, and perhaps because, ‘nobody knows why.’ We live in a world where the wish to write, or, more often, to have written, speaks only of some other, inner wish, whose sense is left unspoken. The novel, real or projected, achieved or abandoned, exists in the mind of its writer less as a literary object than as a wish underwritten by other wishes.” — David Winters
Today’s post is about why you write. Do you write because you have a story to tell? Do you write because you can’t fathom doing anything else? Or, do you write because everyone else is and you think you can too?
No matter what your reason for writing is, remember for everyone that thinks they can write there are just as many that know they can write. Seeing low to mid-quality books on the shelves of bookstores and online should not be enough to prompt you to write. Writers need to aspire to climb to the top of lists, awards and online platforms. Know that to write in today’s market you have to fight adversity, the mid-list, and those that think we’ve hit saturation. Becoming an author isn’t for the faint-hearted.
(via A Piece of Monologue)
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Have You Written Your Breakout Book?
Bookaholics are the ones who start to feel uncomfortable and uneasy in another person’s house, and suddenly realize there are no bookshelves or magazines lying around. People who only own a telephone book and their high school yearbooks scare us.
Robert Lee Hadden
Q: What book would be a friendship deal breaker for you?
Or, what book would start an instant friendship?
