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Walking is an essential writing exercise
No Comments »15th August, 2010; Category: Articles, The Writer's Life, Writer's block, Writers, Writing Hints
I came across an excellent article recently and thought I’d better share it with my readers. It seems that many writers are also walkers. They use taking a walk as an essential part of the writing process. I’ve been advocating this from time to time on this site, especially in those times when you seem not to be making progress with a piece of writing.
The article “On walking and writing” is well worth reading.
Then go out and take a walk.
I would – but I’m writing this post late at night!
Good writing – and walking.
Writers and public speaking
I would guess that writers are mostly introverted people, happy to sit in their office tapping away at their computer creating stories, novels, poems, articles and whatever. Many shy away from the spotlight of public speaking. I believe that this is a narrow view of the writer’s life, one that is potentially limiting to their success as writers.
Writers need to be public speakers
As much as some writers might want to run from this suggestion, in order to promote one’s work the writer today needs to e a good public speaker. I have done considerable public speaking in other areas but very little in relation to my writing. Over the last 5 years I have had many opportunities to speak about Australian birds as a direct result of another blog of mine, Trevor’s Birding.
Prepare to be a good speaker
Joanna Penn on her blog The Creative Penn has written an excellent article on this very topic. Her article How to prepare for public speaking covers the topic really well. I recommend that you flip over there and have a read – or listen to her video. Excellent stuff.
Good writing.
Journal Writing
No Comments »18th May, 2010; Category: Articles, Journal Writing, The Writer's Life, Writing a novel, Young Readers
Some writers do not understand the power of regularly writing in a personal journal.
Journal writing is an excellent way of honing many writing skills that are essential to the writing process. It doesn’t matter much whether you write fiction, non-fiction, articles or blogs, regular writing practice is essential. If possible, I’d encourage all writers, especially beginner writers, to write every day, even if in the first few months or years journal writing is all you do.
I’ve kept a personal journal since July 1990. That means the 20th anniversary is coming up very soon; I must remember to celebrate it here on this blog. I write about anything that comes to mind about events and people in my life. I filled several hand written volumes at first but in recent years I have tended to use my computer. One day I might get around to printing it all out and binding the pages into booklets.
More recently I have also been keeping a writing journal. In this I have recorded the processes I have gone through in writing my stories, especially my recent novels. The journals include details of my ideas, sources of inspiration, research findings and the decisions I had to make along the way. In part you can read how I went about ‘Writing a Novel’ here.
When I was a classroom teacher I used Journal Writing as an integral part of encouraging children to write. The skills developed in my programme had some amazing results, not just with writing. I wrote about it in this article: The Power of Journal Writing – a Story of Hope.
This article relates the experience I had with one of my former students. I bring it to your attention now – especially for my many new readers who may have missed it at the time.
Good writing.
Writing success – magazine article
It is always nice to have a writing success – even if that is a modest piece of success.
This week I received a copy of a magazine which featured an article written by me. This article dealt with how I coped with the stresses of teaching in the few years before I retired. In one sense, writing this article went a small way to helping me heal from those challenging years.
Having my deepest feelings hung out in public was a little confronting, but I’m pleased I did it. It’s not the sort of thing I would ever publish here, nor often comment about. All I can say is that I sometimes find that writing can be a significant part of the healing process. I especially find that with my poetry.
Good writing.
Using interviews for writing
One of the writing assignments I had to complete recently for my Master of Arts in Creative Writing course involved doing an interview. I then had to write an article suitable for a magazine, giving it a creative angle to show the personality of the person being interviewed. All that in only 500 words.
I don’t enjoy being that restricted but I rose to the challenge. I had to be very ruthless with my word count, cutting back to the bare bones of the story. On this occasion it was my lecturer imposing the restrictions and I would have been marked down if I’d gone over the word count. Editors of magazines are just as demanding. Often they only have space for 150 or 200 words, or less. If you don’t cut the extra words, they will. Then you might find important facts missing from the final article.
Anyway, I was reasonably pleased with the end result. I managed to keep within the word count too. The lecturer gave me a distinction, so she was pleased with it as well.