WRITE TIME AND AGAIN

Let Your Light Shine

Posted on January 15, 2021January 15, 2021 by L. M. Montes

We all have something to say, and how we say it is unique to us. No one else can say what we want to say in quite the same way. Let’s say for example there are two different people writing on the same exact topic, and they don’t put their names on their paper. They give them to you (you’re blind folded when they give them to you so you don’t know who gave you what), and you read them. Will you be able to tell which paper came from which individual? One’s personality comes through in their writing. If you don’t know the writer personality, would you still be able to tell? Whether or not we know someone doesn’t take away from the fact that their writing is still unique to them.

This uniqueness is your voice, your light. Who you are comes through on the pages. Whether you’re writing in one character or in more than one, your words are the words that are bringing the story to life. Don’t hold back for fear someone might not like it, because, truth be told, there’s always someone out there who won’t. That’s part of life. Put your all into your work. Put your light into it and let it shine.

As a side note here, if you are editing someone else’s work, be careful to not change too much because you run the risk of inserting your unique style into their work, then it won’t be theirs. You don’t want to take away from their voice/style. A better idea would be to suggest the type of change that’s needed, and let them to the changing.

Social

God’s Painting

Posted on January 14, 2021 by L. M. Montes

Social

Love

Posted on January 13, 2021 by L. M. Montes

Love

Fiction

Your Odyssey

Posted on January 13, 2021January 13, 2021 by L. M. Montes

Photo by Enric Cruz Lu00f3pez on Pexels.com

Everyone has an odyssey of sorts. If you are still in your 20’s, your odyssey is still in the beginning stages. If your are older, say in your 50’s, your odyssey is still in progress, but you have quite a life journey up to that point even more so.

We all have experiences that lead us somewhere. Maybe yours led you exactly to the point at which you wanted to be, even though how you got there wasn’t the road you wanted to take. Or, maybe it was. If you’re a writer, your odyssey is chucked full of material from which you can choose to include in your story. This goes along with a post I did earlier that talked about writing what you know. Today I want to touch on the variety of events in one’s journey/odyssey. I’ll use my own as an example.

My odyssey is in 2 parts. The first part started out in the beautiful state of Michigan, which is where I’m from. There isn’t a lack of places to camp and swim because of the huge coastline due to the lakes we have access to year round. As a result, my family camped quite a bit. The explorations, hiking, bike riding, fishing, and swimming added to the adventures. One summer at the age of 16 was the last camping trip me and my family went on together. An incident happened involving me. A moment of tragedy can happen in an instant but last a lifetime. This began the beginning of my second odyssey. From this point forward there was much I had to overcome, and it wasn’t easy. I, like many human beings, made right decisions and wrong decisions. These decisions helped me to learn and grow from. They gave me something to reflect on and use in order to mature and end up at a place in my life that leaves me saying to myself, “I made it. The journey was rough, but I made it.”

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t still decisions and mistakes to be made, but at least now I have some concrete lessons to base my decision making process on. I’m more informed. Even more, I have something I can reflect on by using these experiences in my books, which is what I did in my novel The Triunix of Time. The book isn’t about my life, but some truths lay within it. In your stories, you will embed your own truths, as many writers do. What I found by doing this is that these bits of truth enrich the story itself because you are leaving your mark. Your feelings regarding them come through to the reader by way of your story characters, your descriptions, and the like.

Don’t use all of your odyssey in one story/book (unless you’re writing an autobiography). Use them as they apply to the story you’re writing. This way, in future books/stories you will have more to use.

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COMING SOON

Posted on January 12, 2021January 12, 2021 by L. M. Montes

Coming in February, my novel, The Triunix of Time, will be on sale here on my blog. See details below.

Format: Paperback
Price: $12.50 – This is HALF OFF the regular price of $25.00 on Amazon.
Special Feature: Each book will be a signed copy.

Fiction, Writing

Inspiration

Posted on January 9, 2021 by L. M. Montes

What inspires you? Is it a beach somewhere? Is it on a balcony overlooking palm trees and a beautiful garden? Is it on your couch at home in the comfort of your living room and your imagination? I’ve done my story writing at my kitchen table a few times, but truthfully, it’s difficult for me to be creative that way. I love being comfortable, so on my couch it is. If I’m writing while at a beach or outside at a park, I’d rather take my writing journal and put pen to paper. We all have our preferred modes of writing. What’s yours?

Another way to find inspiration is to use Pinterest. Yes, Pinterest. I do this. I have private boards for my fiction writing use. In each of these private boards I have sections for each type part of my story I’m working on.

These sections include:

Setting
Characterization
Artifacts
Vintage clothing
Gems

For great information on how use Pinterest for your writing, click the 4:45 minute YouTube link below.

I would love to hear about what inspires you and what your favorite places to write are, so please feel free to comment.

Characterization

Character Flaw

Posted on January 8, 2021 by L. M. Montes

According to Wikipedia, a character flaw (sometimes called a fatal flaw) is as follows:

Character flaw – Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org › wiki › Character flaw
In the creation and criticism of fictional works, a character flaw or heroic flaw is a bias, limitation, imperfection, problem, personality disorders, vices, phobia, prejudice, or deficiency present in a character who may be otherwise very functional.

How do you choose a character flaw for your main character? That is up to you. I centered it around the story. Once you choose a flaw, how do you use it within the story? Is it just there throughout and that’s all and the character goes about their business within the story and never learns anything from circumstances or their actions, etc? If that’s the case, do we even have a story? No. Not really.

The protagonist in your story is supposed to learn along the way. Their character flaw inhibits this at first, but gradually he/she comes to realize they need to change in order for their mission/goal/quest to succeed. By the end of the book they will have overcome this flaw.

Example:

Let’s say you have a main character named Molly, who’s in high school. Her flaw is that she’s timid/shy. She doesn’t like confrontation or violence and prefers to avoid it at all costs. She doesn’t like to hurt the feelings of others, so she avoids situations where she might have to speak up and maybe make people angry. Therefore, she doesn’t speak up for herself either. So, how does she learn to overcome this and become stronger inside? How does she get others to stop picking on her? How does she speak up for the truth and defend her friend Johnny?

In the above example, you have to get Molly from point A to point B to point C to point D; point D being the end of the story where she finally speaks up and gets over her shyness. Getting from one point to the next will involve a series of events called trials and errors that will serve as learning opportunities for her grow, but she can’t do this without these trials and errors.

Fiction

Knowing

Posted on January 7, 2021 by L. M. Montes

We’ve all heard the mantra ‘write what you know’. Well, what do you know? You might get stuck here, and the reason I say this is because you may not think you know enough. Trust me when I say, you do. You have a whole lifetime of experience to use in your writing. You don’t necessarily need to know anything about any one thing in order to write what you know.

In my book The Triunix of Time I have lots of real life experiences included in the story. No, I’m not going to tell you which ones (LOL). There is also included in the story dialogue from conversations I had with others; snippets. Then, the icing on the cake, embellishment. Yes, use what you know and have fun fictionalizing it and building on it.

Here’s an example:

We’ve all had at least one favorite summer; maybe more than one. What made that summer your favorite? Maybe you spent it at the beach most often and you met a new friend, or maybe you spent two weeks of it with a cousin on a farm. Yes, lets use the farm experience. Cousins are a lot of fun. If you have cousins, and I’m sure you do, you know what I’m talking about here. Let’s say you want to write a mystery, but you don’t know what to use as it pertains to setting, characters, etc. Use your experience with your cousins on their farm. Let’s say you and your cousin found a wallet in the barn while cleaning the stalls. It ended up being your uncle’s wallet. Let’s fictionalize that a bit. Maybe you and your cousins were in your early teens. Write a YA mystery involving a bag of wallets you found in a hay loft in a small barn you were both told to stay out of. You were caught by your uncle’s friend when he walked in and heard someone up in the loft. You and Johnny in your haste put the bag of wallets back in a rush and call out. “Just getting some hay for the horses’ stalls.” And on the story would go. Do you see how you could create something wonderful from one experience? By the way, feel free to steal this idea.

Editing

Filler Words

Posted on January 6, 2021 by L. M. Montes

Those pesky filler words don’t need to be there. Get them out of your writing. You just don’t need them. They only serve to take away from and weaken your story. If you think you even need them, think again. We always think we know best. Trust me, we don’t.

The above paragraph has filler words in them. They’re the ones in bold face print. I put them in there on purpose to prove a point. To prove my point, I’m going to retype it and take them out. You’ll see how much better it sounds.

Those pesky filler words don’t need to be there. Get them out of your writing. You don’t need them. They serve to take away from and weaken your story. If you think you need them, think again. We think we know best. Trust me, we don’t.

Sometimes you will need to use them. After all, they are part of the English language and they are there for a reason. The problem is we tend to use them to much. When they’re used too much, that’s when they weaken your writing. When I was editing my novel The Triunix of Time, I had a list of these words to look for in my story. I went through my book and looked for each one of them one at a time and checked them off as I finished with one, then I went on to the next. Don’t worry, I used the Find option in Microsoft Word. It found them all in an instant. As it turned out, I initially used the word just 350 times. Talk about over use. Please see the grid below for a list of the most used filler words.