photo by Joanna

Sometimes we’re tempted to explain to our readers how our characters feel. It’s as though we don’t trust the power of our own writing. Even when our scene is inherently frightful – our character is being held up at gunpoint let’s say – we might fall back on something like, David shook with terror.

That’s pretty abstract. And as far as your reader is concerned,  meaningless.

Readers don’t want to be told about your character. They want to become them. They want to feel their pain, their joy, and everything in between.

So there’s got to be something tangible in the real world for them to connect to. We’re sensual beings, after all. And the way to our most primal emotions is not through our intellect but through concrete images.

The poet Wei Tai once said, “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words.”

Great writing evolves most intently by our attention to the objects in our story or novel. So the way to get the greatest, most imaginative and emotional resonance is not by focusing on your characters’ feelings or their thoughts, but by selecting a world for them to inhabit.

We are what we see.

Or as Charles Baxter once said, “…when people look at things, things look back.”

So if you’re going to give us the contents of your character’s bedroom, or describe the street he’s standing on at night, ask if those details are anchored in your character’s consciousness.

What our characters pay attention to and how they perceive the world around them often reveal more about their feelings than an explicit explanation of their mood can.

A view of the sun rising over the bay, at the same exact moment, will look different to a woman whose child is missing than to a woman who’s just fallen in love.

Emotions are loaded. And they’re pretty complex.

We never feel just one emotion, but several simultaneous and conflicting emotions. Anger can be wrapped up in fear, hurt, disappointment, even love.

The world observed by and in relation to character can embody the full spectrum of emotional layers, feelings that the characters themselves are not equipped to articulate, much less understand.

Take this excerpt from Suzanne Berne’s novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood.

Here, ten-year-old Marsha is reacting to a series of upheavals; her father has just deserted the family to carry on a love affair with her Aunt Ada, and Boyd Ellison, a young boy in the neighborhood, has just been found murdered behind the Spring Hill Mall.  Shortly after these two events collide, here is how Marsha observes the objects in her house:

 I noted the worn patches in the hallway’s Oriental runner, the scuff marks on the stairs, the scorch at the back of the lampshade in the living room. The screen was coming away from the screen door in one corner, curling away from the metal frame like a leaf. The volume-control knob had fallen off the hi-fi, leaving a forked metal bud. Steven had spilled India ink on the sofa, and if you turned over the left cushion, you found a deep blue stain shaped like a moose antler. I had never realized our house contained so many damaged things.

Berne doesn’t tell us Marsha feels sad about her father’s absence. Or fear about Boyd Ellison’s murder. She doesn’t explain that everything Marsha’s learned to trust has been suddenly, irrevocably turned upside down. She lets the objects in her house carry those feelings. Her sadness becomes embodied in “scuff marks on the stairs,” in the “scorch at the back of the lampshade,” in the deep blue ink stain on the sofa cushion.

We know she feels malfunctioned, damaged, broken, and stained herself.

There’s camouflage and, at the same time, revelation.

The narrator tells us something essential about herself, but by shifting the focus to the things in her house, she avoids self-pity and sentimentality.

Objects then can be figurative representations for what our characters can’t, won’t, or refuse to acknowledge about their own condition.

The poet T.S. Elliot called this the objective correlative, and it’s a great way to put “show, don’t tell” into action. He believed the most important element in writing is this:

Rendering the description of an object so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we receive the description is revealed without ever telling the reader what that emotional state is or what has motivated it.

Here’s a writing challenge for you adapted from an exercise by the late John Gardner.

A single mother is waiting at a bus stop. She has just learned that her young daughter has died violently. Describe the setting from the woman’s point of view WITHOUT mentioning the daughter or the death. How will the street look to this woman? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? What will she notice? What will her clothes feel like? Write a 250-word description.

This exercise is demanding. But it’s probably one of best ways I know of to break the urge to explain how your character feels.

The idea is to recreate the character’s experience of the emotion, to come at it aslant rather than directly.

Try it.

And share your insights in the comments below.

Among the things that make these authors masters of the prose form is their reverence for how individual words sound.

They understand that vowel sounds carry and reinforce the emotion, tone, and meaning of their stories.

It’s subtle; readers are rarely conscious  of why they have a particular emotional response to a story. But accomplished poets and prose writers choose words deliberately, with attention to frequencies that hit a certain lyric register.

In today’s video, we’re going to look at the poet’s vowel scale, which is very similar to the music scale. You’ll learn how to choose words based on musical precision so that you can create greater emotional resonance in your stories.

There’s even a fun little writing exercise for you at the end. If you want to share, post your work in the comments below. I’d love to read your writing!

The vowel scale is a great tool, especially when it comes to revising our prose at the sentence level.  Many of us have an instinctive ear for sound, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

So, keeping vowel sounds in mind,  go back to something you’re working on, a scene or passage where you want to convey a particular mood or emotion.

Now look for those places where you seem to be hitting the right musical register. You’ll be surprised how good you already are at this.

Then look for those places where you can be even more musically accurate. Don’t over think this. Just trust your instincts. And, above all, have fun!

Then, if you’re up for it, share a paragraph or two in the comments below. Or send it to me via email: Nanci@emergingwriters.us

Thank you, as always, for stopping by, and for sharing your thoughts, experiences, and stories!

I’ll admit. There was a period in my life when I didn’t sympathize with anyone who moaned about a lack of time to write.

Life was radically different for me back then.

I lived alone in a streamside apartment overlooking Mount Tremper. With vast savannahs of time spread out before me, I had a full-fledged writing practice. Accompanied by mourning doves, cardinals, and the river rushing down the mountain, my writing spells were broken only for food, yoga, and mid-day siestas spent lying on a giant rock in the middle of the stream.

Life was simple. Uncluttered. Harmonic.

In two years I finished a short story collection, wrote a series of essays on the craft of fiction, and earned my MFA. I must have read something like two-hundred-and-fifty books. And I was healthier, fitter, and calmer than ever.

Around this time I also met and fell in love with my soul mate, Ian. Within a few years we gave birth to our daughter Safira.

Priorities shifted in epic proportions.

And for the first time in my life, I relinquished all control over my time.

To say my relationship to my work changed dramatically is an understatement. No more writing in solitude and silence. No more eight-hour stretches of uninterrupted flow. Nope. I wrote with my baby beside me, under me, over me, on top of me.

As she grew from toddler to preschooler, my weeks became even more jam packed.

There were day trips to caves, museums, parks, and lakes. Play dates, costume parades, and fairy-themed birthday parties. At home was the constant surge of meal and snack production, perpetual laundry, and a house that, most days, looked like it had been ransacked by wild chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, project upon project piled up on my queue: manuscripts to edit, coaching calls to deliver, books to outline, workshops to prepare. Revisions. More revisions. Always revisions…

To frustrate matters, Safira rarely napped and was typically, most nights, still leaping off furniture until around midnight.

photo by Ian Laughlin

Which was about the time I’d finally sit down to write. Not exactly my brightest hour, as you might have guessed by now.

So what was an unschooling work-from-home writer-mom to do?

I tried everything.

I renounced minor pleasures like Netflix and HBO.

Deferred house cleaning to the point that, in order to have friends visit, we required at least a 48-hour lead time.

Negotiated with Ian to take on the lion share of gardening, house clean up and organization.

I just about stopped doing yoga, my one pillar of sanity.

I pleaded. I blamed. Yelled. Burst into tears.

Yet, for all the fragmented time I dropped back into my writing cache, I didn’t have much to show. For every page I managed to eke out, there were multitudes of drafts, all on the brink of completion, but not a single one finished.

So these days, when someone tells me they don’t have enough time to write, I get it. I sympathize. Really, I do.

But I’m still not letting you off the hook.

The Myth of Time Management

To paraphrase something the author Stephen Covey once said, we can’t really manage time. We can only manage ourselves.

Because let’s face it. Time is not really the problem.

We all have plenty of it. We all have a say in how we use it. Yet we often squander the hours available to us. And sometimes in the most inane ways.

I used to fire up the Internet first thing every morning. I’d respond to emails. Read a stream of online newsletters. Check in on my Facebook friends, add my two cents to their updates. Hop on Twitter.

Before I knew it, I had frittered away the better part of my morning.

When I turn off the Internet, when I say “no” to low-level distractions, I get reams more writing done. And the most mileage out of my time.

What can you say “no” to?

Make Writing A Priority

Then schedule everything else around it.

It’s not about about cramming more into our day. It’s about stripping down to the few things that really matter. And then making those things absolute and non-negotiable.

If writing isn’t the first thing I give myself before anything else, the rest of of my day is, for the most part, shot. I’m tightly wound, ready to unspool and explode at the slightest infraction. Sure, I can survive a day or two without my fix, but beyond that, I’m pretty unbearable to be around.

Of course there will always be things we must do, like it or not. Writing can’t always take front row and center. But scrubbing the tub or reloading the dishwasher can usually be put off until after we’ve written our pages. Laundry, phone calls, paperwork — all these can be tackled a little at a time during scheduled writing breaks.

It’s all about energy. Not time.

Time is finite. And for most of us, increasingly scarce.

But even if we have just one hour a day to devote to our writing, we can get a lot more done – and done brilliantly – if we’re firing on all cylinders.

How can we level up our energy?

For starters, we can swap out processed, canned, and sprayed food for real, whole, organic food. We can load at least half our plates with leafy greens. Drink less alcohol. Minimize caffeine. Avoid refined sugar. And get our bodies moving; a brisk fifteen- to twenty-minute walk, or ten- minute jump on the trampoline can do wonders.

The things is, there is a relationship between your health and your creative output. Your body is your operating system. Upgrade your operating system, and your writing will soar accordingly.

Define Your Ideal Writing Scenario, Then Move Closer Towards It

Maybe you write best in crowded cafes with jazz pulsing in the background. Or late at night while everyone else in the house is asleep.

My ideal setting is early morning, wrapped in solitude and silence. It’s not the amount of time I crave so much, it’s the quality of it. Uninterrupted. Focused. Pure.

Not easy to come by in a house teeming with life.

So recently, I did something radical. Something I always knew I should do, but never believed I had the pluck to pull off.

I began waking up early. Very, very early.

Nowadays, almost without exception, I rise between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. The silence, the sense of expansion and creative liberation this brings is sacred. And it’s the closest I can get to that ideal writing space I luxuriated in before becoming CEO of my household.

These days, I can outline a book, edit a manuscript, revise a short story, maybe even slip in a brief meditation — all before Ian and Safira even stagger out of bed. Any writing I do during the balance of the day is a bonus.

When I take the reigns and create my own oasis of writing time, rather than demand my family bend to my will and create it for me, writing and everything else that follows, becomes easier. Time stops being this unwieldy force I have to wrestle, control, and conquer.

I may not be writing all day, every day, like I used to. And yes, my house is still a mess. But I’ve produced far more work in the past few months than I have in the last three years. And I’m moving ever closer to my ideal.

How about you? Is time getting between you and your writing? What are you doing about it?

photo by Colin Cubitt

Happiness might be great in real life. But it’s fatal in fiction.

Few things numb readers more than a character surrounded by birdsong and puppies, who isn’t risking something deeply important.

There’s no payoff when everything works out all hunky dory. Or when the outcome is as simple as a character getting what he wants. Or not.

Readers are hungry for danger.

We’re just hardwired that way.

We all have within us remnants of that fight-or-flight response inherited from our primitive ancestors. As we’ve evolved, opportunities to test our mettle have largely diminished. Rarely do we encounter saber-toothed tigers or barbaric enemy tribes.

And while we don’t necessarily need your characters to wage life or death battles, we still crave that primal adrenaline rush. We want to live dangerously with your characters, through them.

But it’s not physical danger we crave so much. It’s emotional danger.

To get your characters into trouble, and for their own good, they must be confronted with choices. Hard choices. The kind that shake their sense of who they are, or thought they were.

The Trouble With Conflict

We’re often told that characters must want something. And want it badly.

To create tension, there must be obstacles thrown into your character’s path. By the story’s end, your character either gets what he wants, or doesn’t.

At first glance, this may seem like an easy formula for plot structure. The trouble is, human desire and the messiness it dredges up are far more complex. That’s because we tend to have simultaneous desires rubbing up against each other. The conflict may arise from external circumstances, but they’re fought largely within, between our own emotional dualities.

And, as it often turns out, when we get what we want, there’s something equally important we’re forced to let go of. It might be our feelings about a loved one. A prejudice. What we believe is true about the world.  Or true about ourselves.

Conflict is an often misunderstood and overblown concept.

I think a better question to ask of your character is this:

What’s at stake? What hangs in the balance?

In Andre Dubus’s classic, A Father’s Story, Luke Ripley is faced with a choice: report a hit and run accident in which a young man dies, or hide the evidence to protect his only daughter.

If he reports the accident, he must also turn his daughter in to the police. If he covers up the evidence, he robs the victim’s parents of emotional closure and, at the very least, knowledge of what happened to their son. The latter goes against the very core of what Luke knows is morally and legally right.

The stakes would be high for any father in this situation.

But Dubus raises the stakes even higher by rendering a father who is also devoutly religious. Luke’s morning ritual centers around talking to God. He prays daily. Attends Mass each Sunday. His best friend is a priest.

So when the moment of decision comes, he’s wedged between two powerful but conflicting urges.

What hangs in the balance, what he is forced to question, is his relationship with God, the fulcrum of his very identity.

When writing your story, instead of asking, What is the conflict? try asking, What’s at stake? What does my character stand to gain? What does he stand to lose?

Whatever the outcome, something will  be lost, while something entirely unexpected might be gained.

That’s where the danger lies. And that is what your readers are hungry for.

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If you’ve been writing long enough, you’ve probably come across advice that goes something like this:

Be vigilant about your use of adjectives.

Two adjectives to a single noun are usually too many, and even one is risky.

Sound advice, surely.

Her weak body shook as the salty sweat trickled down her tremulous, frightened face.

might better be written as…

She trembled as salty sweat trickled down her cheeks.

But sometimes we heed the call to reign in adjective too dogmatically, dismissing the possibility that, when carefully selected, adjectives can breathe essential life into our description.

It’s not about heaping on unnecessary modifiers. It’s about selecting adjectives with purpose. Nothing should ever sneak into our narrative that serves as mere ornamentation.

Effective adjectives heighten your story’s effect.

Denis Johnson, one of the most economical writers I know of, uses adjectives sparingly. When he does adorn his prose with the occasional descriptive, it’s carefully chosen, sensually evocative, and placed for impact. And it often serves a larger, more evolving need of the story.

Take these two sentences from his story, Emergency.

…Georgie and I went out to the lot, to his orange pickup.

We lay down on a stretch of dusty plywood in the back of the truck with the daylight knocking against our eyelids and the fragrance of alfalfa thickening on our tongues.

What’s so effective about dusty and orange?

Without dusty to describe the plywood, we wouldn’t get a tactile and visual sense of the truck’s dinginess and grit.

Not only does dusty trigger sensory replications, it marshals forth a flood of unconscious associations. Neglect, dilapidation, poverty, and even self loathing are all imbued in that dusty stretch of plywood.

Plywood on its own just wouldn’t give us the same imprint.

Selection and Purpose

Even the orange color of Georgie’s truck is strategically selected. Johnson could’ve easily chosen a more familiar color, let’s say blue. But blue would’ve barely registered. The unexpected orange pickup jumps out at us. We can’t have a neutral reaction to it.

What’s really interesting about this choice though, is how Johnson recycles it three pages later, repeating the color of the truck to show, rather than tell us, the changing time of day:

It was still daytime, but the sun had no more power than an ornament or a sponge. In this light, the truck’s hood, which had been bright orange, had turned a deep blue.

That’s the difference between a consciously crafted adjective, and a throw-away word.

Why Adjectives Get a Bad Rap

Many adjectives don’t describe at all. They just take up space.

Telling us Annamaria is beautiful, that she’s thin, has short black hair and a penchant for wearing black clothes, gives us little, if anything to see. A good start, maybe, but it doesn’t even come close to bringing this woman to life.

What does thin and beautiful look like, anyway?

Give us the proof, please.

General adjectives like attractive, skinny, big, young, etc. just bloat your prose with meaningless labels. And they hold little, if any descriptive power.

That’s because they don’t call forth images.

Check out this introduction to Annamaria from Bernard Malamud’s story, Still Life:

The pittrice, a thin, almost gaunt, high-voiced, restless type, with short black, uncombed hair, violet mouth, distracted eyes and tense neck, a woman with narrow buttocks and piercing breasts, was in her way attractive if not in truth beautiful. She had on a thick black woolen sweater, eroded black velveteen culottes, black socks, and leather sandals spotted with drops of paint.

Here Malamud appears to break every cardinal rule we’ve learned about adjectives.

To begin with, he uses the vague attributes, attractive, beautiful, thin, and restless. But he pulls it off because he backs those labels up. With specific nouns and a surge of vivid, dynamic adjectives.

An unrepentant rule breaker, he packs adjectives upon adjectives. 22 of them in just 2 sentences! He even repeats black four times – a narrative breach most high school English teachers would relish taking their red pen to.

Malamud may be more liberal with adjectives than Denis Johnson, but he still chooses each one deliberately. If he’d left out even one of these qualifiers, I doubt Annamaria would have the same impact.

Accumulating Effect

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we infer a lot about the pittrice in a mere two sentences.

… distracted eyes, uncombed hair, narrow buttocks, and piercing breasts provoke the image of an intense, undomesticated, sexually charged woman. Her thin, gaunt figure, eroded black clothes, and paint-splattered sandals suggest bohemian poverty.

The author never discloses Annamaria’s age. But we can intuit that she’s probably in her late twenties by the black velveteen culottes she wears, her piercing breasts and the ornery disposition that her tense neck and high voice suggest. Her violet mouth and black clothes imply mysterious, dark, even morbid preoccupations.

In sum total, these adjectives help deliver a knockout introduction to Annamaria, who, as the story unfolds, makes good on every inference we make. These adjectives don’t create a static portrait. They live on in the character throughout the story.

To Adjectify or Not

An adjective is either enriching your description, or diluting it. It’s either expanding your narrative universe, or rendering  it dismissible.

If it lacks purpose, even one adjective is too many.

But if it’s heightening the effect, it doesn’t matter if you have one adjective to a single noun, as in Johnson’s example, or several, as in Malamud’s.

As long as it serves your story.

Use adjectives liberally or moderately. Just don’t use them cheaply.

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I used to dread revision.

The more I’d try to fix my story, the more lost and frustrated I’d become.

After dozens of rewrites, convinced my story was an irreparable mess, I’d shove my story into the drawer and move onto the next new draft.

Which would lead to more revision. More confusion and frustration. Utter despair.

Fast forward to today:

Rewriting is not only manageable, it is, hands down, my favorite part of the writing process.

To quote Bernard Malamud, revision is for me, “one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”

What changed?

My misconceptions about the writing process. And some gradual, steady realizations.

Writing is Rewriting

I used to get discouraged whenever I found that my first, second, or third draft needed more work. I thought rewriting meant my work was a failure. Or that I lacked talent.

I’d look at a story from workshop, or read a magnificent novel and think, Wow. I wish I could write like that. Writing must come so easy to him or her.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Every piece of literature we love and revere has been written under incredible doubt, frustration, confusion, and many, many, many rewrites.

Hemingway rewrote the last page of Farewell to Arms 39 times before he felt satisfied.

Dorothy Parker said it typically took her six months to write a short story.

And John Irving says that more than half, maybe even two-thirds of his life as a writer is spent rewriting.

Once I banished the misconception that there was a distinction between writing and rewriting, I was able to stop chasing the result and just flow with the process.

I learned to embrace chaos. To trust that some kind of shape, order, and relevance would, in due time, emerge from an inchoate mess of imagery, episodes, memories, abstractions, and so forth.

And I stopped berating myself for not having produced a brilliant draft right out of the gate.

Our First Draft is the Raw Material

It flows. It’s cathartic. Exhilarating. It feels brilliant. And it is.

But rarely do we get to write a first draft and say we’re done.

That’s because our first draft is for telling us what our story wants us to say.

Revision is where we dive back into our material and see what the work needs. It’s where we expand, enhance, refine, and crystallize what’s inherently there.

Revision is an Investigation

For years, my biggest misconception about revision was that it was about “fixing” my story. Doing it over.

My job was to alter, amend and correct all that my teachers and peers had prescribed as “problematic.”

But the harder I tried to improve my story, the more disconnected I felt from it. And the farther away I strayed from the internal impetus that had driven me to write it in the first place.

Once I understood that revision wasn’t so much about changing my story — that it was more about giving it air and letting it breathe — I gained much more control over my material.

Revision isn’t just about retooling sentences and paragraphs, changing words, fine-tuning grammar, cutting and adding scenes. That’s an essential part of it, sure.

But revision is also about probing what’s already on the page, however submerged it might be at the moment. It’s about digging deep, learning not just what we’re writing about, but why it matters to us.

Because if we don’t know the what and the why, all the changes we make to structure, word choice, description, and so on, don’t bring us any closer to the story we were meant to tell. They might even lead us farther astray.

Revision Is a Receptive, Intuitive Act

Listen to your draft. Our work is smarter than we are. Embedded inside it are clues to what our story is trying to become.

Consciously or unconsciously, all those disparate images, symbols, objects, and memories you dialed up made it onto the page for a reason.

When reading your work, tune in to the recurring elements, images, and so forth that strike thematic chords. Which of these have an emotional or psychological charge? Unwrap them. Even the most seemingly random detail can unlock the emotional essence of a scene. Examined closely enough and from enough angles, a single image can bear the meaning of your entire story.

Rewriting is Essential

That’s because we evade our material more than we realize.

We’re often motivated to write because of certain memories, emotions and events that are far too powerful and complex to be fully grasped or articulated in our early drafts.

As memoir writer Larry Sutin says, “We rewrite because we didn’t have the courage to face it the first time.”

Each time we revisit our material, we gather more courage and momentum to dive a little deeper.

And if we stick with it, we come out on the other side with something coherent, unified, artful, and above all, moving.

YOUR TURN

What’s been your experience with revision? Is it your favorite part of the writing process? Do you struggle with it? Resist it? Any frustrations? Breakthroughs? Tell us about it. Share your thoughts below.

But what if we could summon inspiration at will? If each time we sat down to write, we could reach that magic zone where the words just spilled out onto the page?

What if there were some particular rituals, or triggers to that special consciousness that guaranteed an unstoppable, no-holds-barred writing session?

Inspiration is mysterious. But it isn’t something we have to wait for.

What we often refer to as ‘the muse’ – the goddess or power that fuels our creativity – isn’t outside of us. It’s right here within us.

Here are some ways to summon your inner muse.

1. Relax

Writing is not entirely a conscious process. It’s intuitive.

When we try to control or summon our writing solely through the intellect, we sometimes wind up feeling emotionally disconnected from our work. Creativity then gets blocked.

Our creative process flourishes when we’re relaxed and receptive. Jack Myers, who explored creativity in his book The Portable Poetry Workshop, said that when we’re in a state of receptivity, “our creative powers are galvanized into action, many times on the unconscious level, by the power of suggestion triggered by our associations.”

Myers illustrates it this way:

“If you see a bird, your unconscious will evoke the idea of flight or maybe symbols representing freedom. That in turn (or possibly simultaneously) reacts with memory, which might conjure up specific bird-related experiences. Then the chain reaction and interchange between memory and imagination, guided by rational and poetic logic, kicks in.

When we relax and pay attention to these unconscious signals, we become aware of the experience in terms of its meaning. We become conscious of what the unconscious is “saying.”

2. Freewrite

Freewriting is one of the best ways to get words on paper that I know of. The idea is to write non-stop, a stream-of-consciousness riff for a specific interval of time. 10 minutes, let’s say.

The writing doesn’t have to be grammatically correct or fluent. It can be riddled with typos, nonsensical chatter and fragments. The important thing is to keep writing.

Can’t think of anything to say? Feel about as inspired as a speck of dust? Great. Write about that.

It’s not that freewriting leads to brilliant writing. It could lead to brilliant writing. But that’s not the point.

The goal is in the process, not the outcome.

When we freewrite, we break through our own creative resistance. We let go of our expectations to write something dazzling, structured, or even coherent.

Our freewrite is our private, uncensored space. A creative freefall.

3. Carry a Notebook

Slip it into your back pocket.

Capture random things you observe or imagine. Anything goes. Snippets of  conversation overheard on a train. The quirky habits of your boss. An image or memory that occurs out of thin air. Anything that fascinates or repels you.

The great thing that happens when you keep a notebook on hand is that you tune in to the world. You become present. More receptive. You catch  the nuances and subtext, the surprising juxtapositions, the details.

All inspirational nuggets for your writing.

4. Play

Writing prompts are great creative fire starters.

A word. A situation. A phrase. An image.

You might list every job you ever had. Or every lover who broke your heart.

Start with a light bulb. Or a park bench. A comb from your purse…

Any random object or word can unleash a flood of associations, images, and memories. It could be the impetus to a rich, full-fledged story.

It’s all about bringing an exploratory approach to your writing that calls upon conscious, unconscious, intuitive and serendipitously received images, sentences, characters, phrases, and so on.

5. Write About What Matters to You

F. Scott Fitzgerald used to advise aspiring writers to “sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.”

So what’s important to you? What attracts or repels you?

What memories refuse to let you go? What is it about your past that you’re trying to understand? What are you ashamed of? Explore your fears. Your irrational desires.

Let your work breathe.

Remain curious about the world.

Let go of this notion that you have to wait for the muse to show up before you have permission to be brilliant.

Become your own muse.

Over to You

What rituals and triggers do you use to inspire your writing? How do you encourage your inner muse to come out and play?

Eager to hear your thoughts below.

I love you for writing this.
This is the best thing I’ve ever read.
If you don’t go on writing, I’ll die.

We all want that validation that comes from hearing how great our writing is.

We’ve spent a lot of time roaming inside our characters’ heads and inhabiting their world. For us, every image, scene and piece of dialogue is charged with meaning and emotion.

But then our readers tell us otherwise. They begin every comment with, “The problem I had was…”

Or, “The writing is beautiful, but…”

They’re confused, bored, lost. The metaphors we’ve crafted elude them entirely. They think our main character is a jerk. Our dialogue isn’t convincing. Our story is riddled with cliches…

It’s downright devastating to learn that your work isn’t as brilliant as it felt when you were writing it.

But if you’re uncomfortable, congratulations. You’re on the brink of a breakthrough.

Accept the Likelihood That Your Story Might Not Be the Best Version of Itself. Yet.

Whatever’s not working in your story right now is appropriate to its stage of development. And that’s okay. Writing is an evolving process.

We generally start somewhere on the surface of our story, then go deeper as we revise. Each time we dive into our material, we become more intimate with our characters. We inhabit their world more concretely. Narrative shape emerges, dialogue becomes crisper, themes come more into focus, the language more precise.

A great story doesn’t happen all at once. There are many, many elements to consider and we can only pay attention to so many elements at any given time.

Once you accept that your story is a work in progress, that it may even have a long way to go, it gets much easier to welcome even the most critical feedback as an opportunity to move closer to your vision and, ultimately, write the best story you can.

Focus On What the Work Needs

Forget about what you need to hear in order to feel talented or worthy. It’s irrelevant, really. It’s all about the work now.

Your readers have an obligation to give you candid, constructive feedback. This includes all the inherent genius in your work. But it also includes all the things you have yet to learn and put into practice.

Suggestions on how to improve your story aren’t proof of its failure. They’re a testament to your work’s possibilities.

Remember That Your Work Has a Life of Its Own

It’s separate from you. And what often feels like a personal attack on you and your abilities is your reader’s genuine attempt to figure out what your piece is struggling to become.

That’s because they’re grappling with the very same issues. That’s right. Your teachers, your peers, authors you revere — all of us struggle to varying degrees with character development, point of view, structure, scene creation, dialogue, and so on.

Your manuscript is a catalyst for everyone to explore the complex range of challenges all writers face.

Feedback isn’t prescriptive. It’s generative. What we learn from feedback extends far beyond the manuscript at hand, and serves us in good stead as we continue to revise and write new stories.

Don’t Try to Please Everybody

You might receive eleven comments from your workshop group. You might get several pages of feedback from your mentor. That doesn’t mean you have to incorporate every suggestion or comment into your next revision. In fact, if you do that, you’re almost guaranteed to produce a mediocre story.

The only time you should heed the majority is when most of your readers have a similar reaction. If nobody gets that the bonsai tree is a metaphor for your character’s emotionally stunted life, that’s a pretty good indication that you need to make that connection more felt.

Consider all comments carefully, but stay attuned to the three, maybe four comments that really resonate for you. What comments feel spot on? Which feel totally off the mark?

Trust you Instincts

You have all the answers. They just need to be ignited and coaxed out of you. Only you know what your intentions for your story are, even if they aren’t all fully realized, articulated, or expressed on the page yet.

Ultimately, it is up to you, the writer, to choose which direction you want your work to go.

Keep Writing

Good feedback, lukewarm feedback, scathing comments, rejection from editors, bad reviews – don’t let anyone determine your own attitude about your writing. What matters in the end is your own satisfaction with your work. Every time you sit down to write you are making progress.

And remember – where you are with your writing right now has nothing to do with your potential, which is limitless.

Have you ever had less than stellar feedback on your work? I’d love to hear your experiences. How did you deal with it? Leave your comment below.

In this video we’re going to talk about how to manage both.

On the publishing side, we’ll talk about the different rights magazines might purchase for your story, and what it all means.

We’ll also talk about the flip side of publishing. That’s right–rejection.

I’ll take you behind the scenes to share the various reasons editors might reject your story, many of which, by the way, have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your writing.

I’ll also share a healthy way to view rejection so that when it happens, as it inevitably does, you can embrace it as the brilliant opportunity that it is.

But if you’re anything like me, organizing submissions isn’t exactly your strong point.

When I first started submitting my work, I had information scattered everywhere. We’re talking multitudes of Word files, folders within folders, response letters in drawers. A big, unwieldy mess, really.

So when I learned how to create a submission log from fiction writer, Joe Meno, I was beyond relieved. This system not only keeps simultaneous and multiple submissions under control and all in one place, it gives me a clear report on which stories need a little fine tuning and which need some major revision.

In today’s video, I’m going to show you how to create your own submission log.

You will learn:

and more…

Enjoy!

What about you? What are some of your best strategies for tracking submissions? Leave your comment below.