I was having tea on Canyon Road with literary agent Irene Webb and she mentioned a trip to New York to visit with editors. What are they looking for? I asked. Her answer boiled down to two points: 1) A writer with a unique voice; 2) A writer with a strong a platform. Voice? We know it when we hear it, when we read it on the page. It’s a sort of author’s thumbprint, and it lends the story its unique flavor, energy and tone. More about voice in a future post. Platforms? Does the word bring to mind discos, …
Author: Sarah Lovett
PLAY IT RISKY
I met Donald Maass last October when we were both among the presenters at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference in Surrey, British Columbia. Not only is Maass a high-powered agent with great marketing advice for writers, he is also a writer who truly cares about other writers, their creative process, and their stories. Read what he has to say about originality and fiction on his new blog at Writer Unboxed–and never play it safe again.
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING -How not to ship your power out with the manuscript.
Over the next weeks I’ll be focusing on the business of writing–building your platform, choosing authentic career strategies, finding the right agent, evaluating your publishing options from traditional to POD to e-books to Kindle. And most importantly, how to hold onto your power and your sanity over the course of your creative lifetime. I’m not going to try to organize these “biz” posts in any particular order. Instead, I’m posting links to sites I already know are useful. And I’ll be on an active hunt to discover new (to me and perhaps to you) resources. If you’re serious about the …
CARTOONS, HORIZONS & OTHER OUTLINES
As part of my family’s spring break, I spent the past few days revising an outline. This novel is already in progress but I’ve been making changes to some of the plot elements and I wanted to “picture” the whole again. I worked up a six-page prose outline. Sure enough, it gave me a new perspective. Still, I wanted an instant picture. My first idea was to use a “horizon” outline. It’s something I do often and it’s simple. I draw a line across a long sheet of paper. I divide the line into thirds to represent the three acts …
THE FORCE FIELD OF RELATIONSHIP
Writers talk a lot about viewpoint characters. The story is told from her viewpoint. Or his viewpoint. Or both their viewpoints. Sometimes we become so focused on maintaining a strict viewpoint, we forget that narrative is about relationships. Relationships. Interactions. Exchanges. Collisions. Between people. And between a person and her world. When you write your next scene imagine an energy field or aura surrounding each of your characters. As you write, put your attention in the space where these energy fields collide. Now imagine an energy field (or a thousand different fields) coming from the physical world–the birds singing …
MANTRA FOR PERFECTIONISTS
CONNECTION THROUGH IMPERFECTION
SECRETS & LIES – Daily Writing
If you are writing fiction and you want to spark a two-character scene and/or a short story, endow one character with a secret and the other with a lie. Now let them interact without either one revealing the truth. Too lazy or virtuous to come up with something juicy? Visit the Post Secret website for inspiration. It’s one of my favorite “writerly” sites online.
CREATIVE BANKING
Last week, in the midst of a busy coaching schedule, a busy writing schedule, and my always busy family life, I took time out for some creative banking. I don’t mean I did some funny business with my income tax prep. I do mean I took stock of past, present, and future writing projects, and I discovered how much I have in my creative “bank”. If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you have projects you’ve left simmering on the back-burner and projects you’ve just plain left behind because it was time to move on. Those that are …
WOOING YOU BACK
One of the best essays I’ve read about reconnecting to your novel and moving past “stuckness” was penned by Gail Godwin and published in The Writer. Godwin suggests that a creative work in progress may react to the fear of abandonment like an aggrieved pet, giving you, the author, the cold shoulder or even turning its back on you completely. The provocation of this punishment may be as slight as a busy weekend you spent with your family or a missed writing session. It may be more dramatic–weeks of putting your manuscript on the back-burner. When disconnect occurs, you the writer …
A Tip for the Day–AHA!
Today’s writing tip is a simple way to avoid “math anxiety” when it comes to reviewing scenes: Remember that your primary character has an objective in each scene. That goes for other characters who are active in the scene. Objectives change–and they may begin as reactive (as in your character reacting to something that happens) but ultimately that reaction translates into action, subtle or profound. These are also called scene goals–each character has her own goal in each scene, and those goals are most often in conflict because we want conflict in story. When it comes to opening scenes, another …